


Rattling Cages

by LoveLeah



Series: Rattling Cages [1]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Dumb Boys Being Bad at Emotions, Eventual Smut, Explicit Sexual Content, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Headaches & Migraines, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Podfic Available, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:46:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 48,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23632558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoveLeah/pseuds/LoveLeah
Summary: Nolan gets ditched, wears short-shorts, and tries to figure out his head.Travis buys a dildo, spends $2000 on Etsy, and makes a folder for all the Nolan pictures on his phone.
Relationships: Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Series: Rattling Cages [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794613
Comments: 441
Kudos: 816





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One night I had a migraine and couldn't sleep and I wrote this whole first chapter in bed and then it got way bigger than I expected!
> 
> This is not trying to be canon compliant--please completely disregard the NHL schedule, the calendar year in general, where TK and Nolan lived when, and any facts about hockey. :) Also, migraine details are based on my own experiences and a bit of research, but, like, everyone experiences and treats their migraines differently. 
> 
> Title is from “Changes” by Langhorne Slim, which is 200% Patty’s jam during this fic.
> 
> Update 1/29/2021 - This was the first hockey fic I ever wrote, and it got so much more attention than I expected. I'm so flattered that so many people have enjoyed it and connected with it, but I've never been completely happy with the plotting and pacing (among other things). So I've spent a bit of time over the last month revising all the chapters; basically taking out the parts that I really disliked and trying to balance making this work into something that I can feel proud of with not spending too much time on it when I have other writing projects I would rather focus on. So, like, thus: I haven't done a final read through and there are still mistakes and imperfections. If you see anything egregious, feel free to let me know! 
> 
> If you're reading this for the first time I hope you like it! If you don't, maybe give my other hockey fics a try--I think I've grown a lot as a writer since finishing this. 
> 
> If you're rereading or revisiting, I hope I didn't take out your favorite part or ruin the story for you! You can access a PDF of the pre-revision version [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t1ebzqTH4sidN4jHC6kT7XN4CsFMKMSh/view?usp=drivesdk), or you can have it read to you on Matriaya's beautiful podfic. The basic plot is still pretty much the same, and I added very little. I mostly just removed scenes and characters (RIP Charlie) and tried to fix mistakes and improve my writing when I could. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!! :)

Nolan got his diagnosis in early August, after a summer spent trying to work out and ending up lying in his bed, trying to hold his head as still as possible, wishing that he could turn off all of his senses. 

He called AV first; told him and got passed on to one of the Flyers’ doctors who put him in touch with a neurologist in Winnipeg. Nolan went in and got an MRI and so many blood tests his arm was bruised and just spent fucking hours answering questions and getting led around by nurses, and a few days later, the neurologist called him in and Nolan called the Flyers doctors and put them on speaker, and then he got told he had a migraine disorder.

Nolan had honestly been expecting something worse. He still remembers his first thought after the doctor said it all solemn: Well if I’d known it was just headaches and not a fucking tumor I never would’ve told anyone. 

They talked him through their initial treatment plan. The neurologist warned him that treating migraines was hit or miss, but the doctors from Philly assured him that he would be good by preseason, and so Nolan just did what they told him. Suffered through his migraines, which got worse and worse over the course of the month, and waited until the no-caffeine no-preservatives no-sugar diet he was on and the pills he was taking started working. 

Travis facetimed him not long after his diagnosis, on one of the days Nolan didn’t have symptoms. Nolan was sitting on the back porch at his parents’ house, blackout sunglasses and a snapback pulled over his eyes, just enjoying the feeling of the skin of his chest and shoulders slowly heating up and sweating in the sun. 

“Patso, what's up!” Travis yelled right away, phone right up under his chin, big white smile and glowy tan, his voice excited and familiar and loud.

Nolan turned the brightness on his phone up a notch and put the volume down as quiet as it would go. “Hey, Teeks,” he said, glad Maddie and Aimee were out so they couldn’t hear how ridiculously fond his voice was, like he was talking to a fucking puppy.

“Dude, you wouldn’t believe the pickerel I caught today,” Travis said, and Nolan could hear and see him vibrating with happiness the way he always got when he was on the lake. 

Nolan pulled in a long breath, feeling like his lungs were fuller than they’d been in forever; feeling like he was sucking smoke out of TK’s mouth; getting a hit of energy off him like he always did. He knew some people--Nico--didn’t really get why they were friends, and Nolan would never explain it to another person this way, but being around Travis made Nolan feel like he was more of himself than he was any other time. Like he could stretch out and feel things more and wake up all the way instead of always being half distracted by hurting and trying to act how he was supposed to and always walking on the edge of a cliff about to fall off and finally have everyone agree that he was a failure. 

“Yeah?” Nolan asked, and that was enough to have Travis telling the story of reeling the fish in, how it was heavy and big and fought against him the whole way.

“You’re a pro fisher, bud,” Nolan told him.

“Fucking rights, Pats. When you come down here again I’m sure you’ll catch some monster and embarrass me again, though.” Nolan smiled against the sun on his face. “What have you been doing?” Travis said, and Nolan would never get tired of the way Travis asked him questions like he really, really wanted to know the answers. 

Nolan thought about telling him about the migraine shit then. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Travis with it--he knew Travis wouldn’t think he was just being a baby. Knew Travis wouldn’t tell anyone if Nolan asked him not to. But he just felt too happy in the moment, all warm from the sun and Travis’ happy voice on the phone, the lack of pain in his head making him feel light and energetic in a way he hadn’t in days. Maybe the treatment’s working, he thought. And if it is, then I’ll be on the ice with him in two weeks. 

He decided he’d tell Travis then. “Dude, I had the craziest fucking headaches all summer,” and then it would just be some weird thing that had happened to him and was over. 

So on the phone that day he just told Travis, “I’ve been sleeping with my parents’ dog at night and I kind of think I want one when I get back to Philly.” 

And Travis just said, “Oh holy shit, yeah, babe, we need a dog so bad,” pet name slipping out like it was nothing, and Nolan felt it in his stomach. Felt in his bones, suddenly and out of nowhere, that this was going to be the season. Had this little daydream of hoisting the Stanley Cup with Travis, leaning over to kiss him under the glint of the silver, their lips tilting together so naturally you could tell it was something they did all the time. 

***

Two weeks later, Nolan was back in Philly but banned from going to the rink, and his head had gone from hurting pretty bad most of the time to being fucking unbearable every single day. 

All his coaches and trainers and doctors agreed that he wasn’t going to start camp or play in the preseason, and Nolan couldn’t really argue with them when he couldn't really even move.

The day before camp was set to start, he still hadn’t seen Travis, whose flight was getting in at basically the last possible minute before their first training session, because Travis always hated leaving the lake.

Nolan wasn't going in to train, but he paced around his apartment all day like he was a rookie again getting ready for his first camp, because it was the day the coaching staff was going to tell the whole team about Nolan's diagnosis and one of the team's doctors was going to explain to a room full of big tough hockey players that migraines were a real and painful thing just like a muscle injury or a bone break. The team of medical people who suddenly seemed to control Nolan’s entire life and were all really into "educating" and "helping people understand" had told him they’d talk the team through it, and Nolan pretended he didn’t give a shit.

He texted Travis two hours before the meeting, "I guess I'm out for a while."

"Wtf no ☹" Travis wrote back right away. "I'm coming over after practice."

When he opened the door to Travis, he already knew something was different. He and Travis had keys to each others’ apartments and an unspoken rule that they didn’t even need to knock before letting themselves in, but Travis tapped lightly on the door and then waited in the hallway even after Nolan opened it.

“Did you lose your key?” Nolan asked, and then thought, That’s not what I fucking want to talk to him about. Because Travis was in front of him, solid and looking good, all summer tan and sturdy, and so even though he was standing an unusually respectable distance away and still hadn’t stepped into Nolan’s apartment, Nolan ducked through the doorway and wrapped Travis up against him.

“Hey Patty,” Travis said, his voice quieter than Nolan thought he’d ever heard it. He brought his hands up to Nolan’s ribs and rubbed them up and down a couple times, and Nolan breathed in a huge lungful of the spiced smell of Travis’ shampoo. “Are you feeling alright right now?" Travis asked, and only when Nolan said yes did he come in. 

And Nolan was feeling mostly okay--the sunlight through the curtains was a little stabby and bright, and he couldn’t stand to have any of the lights in his apartment on, but his head wasn’t bothering him too much compared to, like, the day before. 

And Travis was in his apartment, all energy and stories and his smile and his shoulders and his voice; the way he smelled and moved and just, like, so much shit Nolan hadn’t even really realized he missed until now. 

They ordered dinner and he stayed late, asked Nolan a few perfunctory questions about his migraines but didn’t really seem to want to go into that much detail. Which was fine with Nolan, basically, because why would he want to get into all that when he was having a good day? He figured Travis would come over when he actually had symptoms soon enough, and then he could kind of see what it did to Nolan first hand, and Travis was a hands-on learner anyway.

So he just let himself have a good night with Travis, and when Travis left to go up to his apartment to sleep, Nolan walked him to the door and told him, “This is our year, Teeks,” and at that point he still believed it. 

***

It made him so fucking annoyed to listen to his doctors say it in their reassuring little voices, but it was also, like, true: migraines weren’t just headaches. They made him feel like a fucking troll who couldn’t stand to be out in the light. They made him want to throw up just from pain. Made his ears ring and his brain feel like it was pushing up against his skull and the roots of his teeth ache. He could barely walk, during the worst of them, because he was so dizzy and disoriented. 

But on the morning of G’s welcome back team party, Nolan felt good. Hung over from the migraine he’d had the day before, greasy and a little lethargic because he’d slept through almost all of the last 24 hours, but pain free, which was great, by his new standards. 

He and Travis drove to the party together, obviously. They walked in and made a few rounds together, saying hi to some of the guys. Everyone treated Nolan basically normal--“Hey man, how was your summer? Bummed you’re not back with us yet.” It felt good to be around his team, to tell inside jokes and have Travis next to him and have everyone kind of know that they were a unit, all, “oh fuck Teeks and Patty are here, hide the Rumchata.” 

Nolan eventually just settled into a lawn chair next to G. It was his party, but he was letting Laughts man the grill and just sitting back and glaring at everyone. 

“Hey G,” he said as he sat down.

“Hey Nolan,” G said back, tilting his beer toward him in greeting. 

And then they just sat there in quiet, and watched their team. 

Nolan stayed in his seat when the food was ready, ignoring all the people walking by with stacked up plates. His diet plan was so crazy fucking restrictive that it was just impossible to do anything other than eat the premade meals the team delivered for him. G gave him a sideways look and said, “We have some, like, fruit. Or, vegetables, inside.”

“I’m fine,” Nolan said. And yeah, the fact that he couldn’t drink or eat with his team was a little bit of a bummer, but whatever, he could ignore it.

Travis got more and more hyper as the night went on. He wasn’t even drinking, that Nolan could see, but he was hanging off people, bouncing from person to person, practically hopping around, and basically fucking shouting every word he said.

“Tell your boy to quiet down,” G said at one point.

“Hmph,” Nolan said, and he was definitely not going to smile about that “your boy” in front of G. 

It wasn’t even dark yet when Nolan felt the first symptoms of a migraine--little tingles in his eyes; the weird little squealing sound coming from the back of his head. He should have just called an Uber and let Travis have fun. But, like, he wanted Travis with him, obviously, even if Nolan was about ten minutes away from becoming terrible company. 

So he told Claude, “Thanks man, I’m gonna head out,” and went over to Travis where he was talking to Kevin in the yard. He gave Kevin a “please go away” look, and Kevin nodded at him and shoved Travis toward him before speed walking in the other direction. 

Travis turned into Nolan’s space. Cupped Nolan’s elbow for a second and then ran his hand up to squeeze at his bicep. He grinned up at him and said, loud, right in his ear, "Hey Pat!"

"Hey Teeks," Nolan said softly. “Can you bring me home?"

Travis’ face went all concerned and sort of twisted and he agreed right away, keeping his grip on Nolan’s arm and steering him out of the party without even a goodbye to anyone. Maybe they’ll think we’re gonna go fuck, Nolan thought a little gleefully, because he didn’t really give a shit if his team knew he was gay if it also meant they knew Travis was his. 

But they weren’t going to fuck, obviously. Even if Nolan didn’t have a massive migraine by the time they got back to his place they weren’t going to, because they weren’t like, people who fucked each other. They’d never even kissed each other. They’d never even, like, talked about it, even though it felt to Nolan, sometimes, like they’d been together for years; even though TK had called them an old married couple to the fucking media. 

Travis was quiet on the drive and the walk up to Nolan’s apartment, which was super not-Travis. Nolan kind of thought about saying, “Sound doesn’t really make it worse,” but then maybe Travis was being quiet for a whole other reason, and Nolan didn’t want Travis to think that Nolan thought that everything Travis did was about him.

Damn migraines made him stupid, and Travis made him stupid, and the two of them together turned him into a fucking idiot. 

So maybe that was why he didn’t really realize how weird Travis was being until they got into Nolan’s apartment. Nolan collapsed on his end of the couch and put a hand over his eyes, and started thinking about how he would explain to Travis how it felt. And then he realized Travis was still just standing between the door and the couch, in the awkward empty space of the open plan apartment which Nolan had full of not enough furniture.

“So, do you need anything to drink or anything, or...?” Travis let his sentence trail off, but he was standing awkwardly and barely looking at Nolan and it was pretty obvious what he meant: “or am I good to go?”

Nolan had to swallow before he could talk. “Uh, no, thanks for the ride, man. Have a good night.” 

He jerked his head away from Travis so he couldn’t see--whatever. All the weird things that were happening on Nolan’s face, the way it was probably so fucking obvious how bad he wanted TK to come over and sit next to Nolan or right on top of him and settle his hands on the sides of Nolan’s head and stroke his pointer fingers through the hair at his temples. How he’d been wanting it ever since he got his first crazy headache in the summer. 

Nolan closed his eyes and sunk into the couch.

“Feel better, okay? I need ya back on the ice, man,” Travis said, from over by the door.

Nolan grunted back and tried to imagine how it would feel if Travis came over and kissed the top of his head--warm wet breath and soft and indistinct press of his nose and mouth through Nolan’s hair. 

Nolan listened to Travis take three steps, and then open and close the door and just fucking leave Nolan, limp and achey on the couch, his head swimming with pain and the idea of Travis’ lips and fingers and palms.

***

Starting from that night, Nolan had three weeks of migraines so constant and so screamingly painful that he basically went twenty one days without even feeling like he was alive. 

It was just: wake up from fitful, painful sleep, confirm that he still hurt, go to the bathroom and think about throwing up. Decide over and over again to skip a shower for another day, because standing up for that long and coordinating his fingers enough to open bottles of soap and spread shampoo into his hair just seemed unmanageable. 

His parents called him a lot, and a bunch of guys from the team kept in touch, and doctors and dietitians and chefs came over to make sure he didn’t die, but Nolan was more or less oblivious to anything but how bad he hurt all the time, and, occasionally, in his more lucid moments, how much he wanted Travis to be there.

And when he finally has a migraine free day, the only thing he really for sure knows from those weeks is that Travis kind of fucking ditched him. 


	2. Chapter 2

Two weeks into the longest, worst migraine of Nolan’s life, Nolan’s greasy and barely sleeping and so fucking lonely he wants to cry. He talks to either Aimee or Maddie or one of his parents at least once a day, and Kevin and Ivan have both stopped over and hung out for a bit--awkward because they couldn’t play video games or watch TV or talk hockey the way they always used to when they were together. But he could have the whole fucking team coming by every day, and it still wouldn’t fill the space TK takes up in Nolan’s life. 

Travis will barely respond to his texts and doesn’t come over at all--Nolan knows that for sure, because he’s asked every single member of the Flyers staff that’s come by if maybe Travis stopped by while Nolan was sleeping, and because in the moments he can stand to look at his phone, he’s ignored most of his notifications but checked specifically to see if there’s anything from Traivs. He’s basically totally ignoring Nolan, except for all these fucking gifts he keeeps getting it shipped to Nolan’s address.

Nolan gets a package or two almost daily. His self control when it comes to Travis in general is awful, so he tears all of them open as soon as he picks them up from outside his door, desperate like an addict.

Travis sends a bunch of magazines, which are actually nice because Nolan is so fucking bored and he’s trying to cut his screen time down to basically nothing. 

A ton of migraine stuff he must have found online, like a pack of essential oils and a diffuser, and so many CBD products it’s insane. Plus gift certificates to tons of places in Philly: an acupuncturist, a masseuse who supposedly specializes in pain relief, a tattoo and piercing place that claims that piercing a certain part of your ear can prevent migraines. 

And then all this fucking Etsy shit. Travis is the only basically straight-passing dude Nolan’s ever met who actually shops on Etsy. Nolan gets all these packages with quirky little stamped or handwritten notes that say, like, “thank you for supporting independent businesswomen! :),” and have, like, the weirdest fucking shit in them. Like this little fabric fish filled with rice that you can heat or cool and lay over your eyes, that comes with a tag that says “migraine mackerel.”. A whole wristful of “migraine bracelets” made of “pain relief crystals.” T-shirts that say “Migraine Warrior” and “It’s not a fucking headache.” A big heating pad made out of this soft fabric printed all over with little cartoon sushi, which doesn’t do a single thing to help with migraines but that Nolan ends up microwaving and tucking up against his stomach most nights anyway. 

Every day of getting a gift but not a call from Travis makes Nolan feel more and more like he has no idea what’s going on with them. He gets weak and calls Travis twice, both times when he knows he’s not playing or training. Leaves too-long voicemails thanking him for whatever gift he got that day and asking how Travis has been, complimenting goals he scored. He doesn’t delete them or re-record them, because he figures that his life is falling apart anyway, so what does it matter if he humiliates himself in front of Travis. And he tells himself that, like, maybe Travis is just waiting for Nolan to put himself out there a little so that he knows they’re still good, even though everything is different. Travis responds to both of his voicemails with texts with more emojis than words. 

Nolan doesn’t know what to do, and he can barely think enough to make himself fucking breakfast, so there’s no fucking way he can figure all this shit out when his head’s at, like, 30% at most. He’s left with nothing to do except tear open packages every morning and get more and more pissed about them, and then get back in bed where even his softest pillow hurts him, and think about how good it would feel to stick his head in the middle of a cloud, or, since that’s not a thing, to have Travis run his fingers over his scalp.

And Nolan is not a crier, but a couple times when he thinks too long about Travis not coming by to rub smelly CBD cream on his neck, not driving him to the tattoo and piercing place and getting some stupid little tat while Nolan gets a hoop stuck through part of his ear, not calling him to rehash all the Flyers games like he always did when Nolan was injured and stuck at home before, he gets a little teary. It’s mostly the pain, probably--he’s just weak from going so long without hurting so much that turning on a light makes him wince. 

But then he finally, fucking finally, wakes up one morning and feels okay, and once he’s come out of his migraine coma enough to really think about it, he’s kind of, like, fucking heartbroken or whatever. Because he misses hockey and he’s sick of needing to sit in the dark all day to keep from feeling like he wants to die, and yeah, that all sucks, but he kind of feels like if Travis was there like he had been before, it would maybe be okay. 

Because Travis and him were teammates, and buddies, and "like brothers"-- although hearing the interview where Travis said that last one made Nolan feel a little fucking shitty--but they were also, like, not just that.

They lived two floors apart in the same building and when they were both healthy they drove together to practice every day, Travis speeding like crazy and Nolan bitching about the music, and last season they usually went out for sushi three times a week and they hired a chef to cook for both of them at Nolan's apartment the other nights they were home, and they saw that fucking Queen movie together with every inch of their arms touching on the armrest between their theatre seats. And when Nolan was annoyed after a loss and they got back to one of their apartments or to their hotel room on the road, Travis would always let Nolan lay his head on his lap and would run his fingers through Nolan's hair until Nolan felt relaxed. And when Travis was having a shitty day he'd say, "Give me a hug, buddy?" in this little voice that was secret and soft, so different from the way he talked to the rest of the team, or he'd stay at Nolan's place so late that it seemed not-weird for him to just crawl into bed with Nolan and sleep two feet away from him.

Nolan had wanted to do something with Travis since their first season together two years ago. Before he met Travis, Nolan would have said he was basically totally incapable of figuring out whether someone was into him. But the thing between him and Travis had never really been complicated like that (until just recently, anyway). Neither of them really talked much about their feelings, yeah, and they hadn’t actually done anything or even talked about it, but they were both codependent and touchy, and they fought for each other on the ice and spent as much time as they could together off of it. The guys on the team talked about them having a bromance to the fucking media, it was so obvious.

So Nolan wasn’t trying to play it cool with Travis so much as not really knowing what to do to get where he wanted to be with him. Like, the idea of telling his might-be-straight buddy, "Hey, Teeks, I've thought about you sucking my dick, like, a lot" just seemed unfathomable, and so Nolan basically just kept pretending to be straight-ish like he’d done his whole life. 

But he knew, almost for sure, that Travis was into him, and he knew--one thousand percent for sure--that he was into Travis. And that was good with him for a while, because he'd never kissed anyone and so he needed some time to psych himself up anyway. (His whole kissing under the Stanley Cup thing obviously meant he had to do something eventually, but he'd still figured he had an entire season to get it together.) And it wasn't like Travis was going anywhere, Nolan had always thought. He’d just signed a long term contract in Philly, and they'd visited each other every summer since they'd met and talked on the phone for hours when they were apart. And as far as he knew, it had been, like, a year since Travis dated anyone, and if he was hooking up it had to be pretty rare, because he was basically always with Nolan in his free time. And in some fantasy world where Nolan was healthy they would see each other every day at the rink. 

And then Travis fucking ghosts him, during three fucking awful weeks where he really really could have used his best friend.

***

Nolan’s birthday comes two days after his “migraine attack,” which is just the dumbest fucking name, finally ends.

When he checks outside his door like he does every fucking morning even though he knows he should just stop being so fucking needy when all it does is hurt him, there’s a big purple gift bag sitting in the hallway.

Nolan opens the card tied to the top first

The text on the front is black on a white background and says, “Basic Bitch, Basic Card. Happy Birthday,” in blocky font. 

Nolan laughs, a little watery, but whatever, it’s the first time he’s even felt like laughing in forever. If Travis were actually there, he would’ve bit down on it, because he likes making Travis work for it, and because he’s obviously pissed at Travis. But he’s alone in his apartment, and it’s been days since anything made him feel good, so he’ll take his endorphins where he can fucking get them, even if it’s from one of Travis’ dumb cards. 

Travis is a big card guy--Nolan’s seen the entire fucking drawer in his kitchen that’s stuffed full of cards with cringey little sayings on them. Compared to, like, the “Your friendship is my goal” one with a picture of a hockey puck that Travis gives to every guy who comes up to the team, Nolan’s isn’t too bad: Nolan is a little bit basic, and he sort of likes it when Travis calls him a bitch, even though that’s like, the number one thing on his list of things he’s never going to think about. 

The inside of the card has a tiny paragraph of Travis’ neat handwriting. “Hey Pat! I’m sorry I can't throw you a real party for your b-day this year. I hope you feel good today!! I miss you so much on the ice. Love you, buddy. - TK.” 

Nolan presses the heel of his hand into his forehead and hauls the gift bag to the couch so he can sit down while he goes through it, because he’s only on the card and he’s already feeling fucked up. 

There are three things in the bag, packed in with balled up tissue paper. 

A black t-shirt that says “Babe” in big white text.

A little homemade looking gift certificate Nolan knows Travis must have bought on Etsy. It’s printed with little smiling sushi cartoons and says “Sushi Lover, I’m taking you out!” above a row of lines where Travis has filled out the name of their favorite sushi place in Philly next to "where" and "anytime, baby" next to "when."

And then--a box of cream puffs. Which is actually kind of devastating. 

Nolan’s not going to fuck up his diet plan with cream puffs, obviously, and Travis knows him well enough to know that, probably. 

But cream puffs are, like, Nolan’s one big comfort food. It started in his youth league, when some guy on another team kept calling Nolan "cream puff" on the ice in this voice like it was the meanest thing ever. Nolan had come out of rink upset about an insult he didn’t even understand and asked his mom, a little wobbly, "what's a cream puff?"

She'd talked the story out of him, and then let out this laugh. "Cream puff,” she said wistfully. “I’d love to be a cream puff.” And then they’d gone home and made a batch of cream puffs. Sat in front of the oven and watched them rise, licked homemade whipped cream off their fingertips, and then filled and ate the whole batch before they’d even cooled.

It's, like, one of Nolan’s most embarrassingly cheesy memories, and he’d told the whole thing to Travis one night when they got wasted out with the team and then came back to Nolan's place together and kept on drinking. Told him how cream puffs were still one of his favorite foods but how he only ever ate them when he was feeling really lonely, because they had this special power to cheer him up and make him feel like he was back home and he thought if he ate them too often they'd lose that and become just another food. 

And Nolan hadn’t even thought Travis really remembered that. But here Nolan is, sitting on his couch with a box full of perfectly round little cream puffs in his lap.

Nolan doesn’t know what to do with any of it. Like, if it had come a month ago, he would have blushed and felt glowy and happy all day and worked really hard to sound sincere and not sarcastic when he thanked Travis. 

But, fuck. It’s not a month ago, it’s now, and Nolan is miserable and Travis is fucking nowhere, and he just wants to leave this bag of “love you” “buddy” “babe” “let’s get sushi when you’re better” “I remember the cream puff story” bullshit at Nolan’s? 

Nolan squeezes his head, then presses his fingers hard into his eyes. He puts the cream puffs on the kitchen counter so his care team can have some when they stop by, and then he purposefully, painfully doesn’t text Travis, and instead calls his mom, and listens to her and his dad sing happy birthday to him over the phone. 

***

And then the week before Nolan’s set to fly home for Canadian Thanksgiving--which is kind of a stupid thing to fly home for, but his doctors cleared him and it’s not like he’s got anything going on in Philly--Travis comes by Nolan’s apartment. 

When Nolan opens the door to a quiet knock, the sight of Travis standing there in workout gear, giving Nolan a fake smile and holding a huge paper bag is not what he’s expecting. 

Nolan knows without even having to think about it that it’s been a month and a half since they’ve seen each other. A month and a half of living in the same city; the same building, and Nolan hasn’t seen Travis in person since the night of Claude’s party. 

Nolan just stands in his doorway and stares at Travis, and he hopes his face looks angry, but he’s pretty sure it’s just lonely, and hurt, and hungry, because even though Travis made him cry, he still looks so, so good to Nolan, with his white-trash facial hair and his snapback and his mouth, which just kills Nolan all the time. 

“‘Sup, man,” Travis says, his voice casual, but Nolan can tell he’s feeling twitchy. Nolan just looks at him. Sup? he thinks. Man? 

“I’m about to head to the rink so, sorry I can't hang out, but I was just--” he stops abruptly and swallows, and then his voice gets drawly and low and a little more serious. “Thinkin’ bout ya, and missing our sushi dates. And I don’t know what all you can eat or what, but I just figured I’d get a bunch of everything and maybe you could find something good.” 

Nolan has just no idea what to say to all that, and that makes him even more annoyed. Because Nolan has spent a lot of his life feeling awkward and not knowing what to say, but it was never like that around Travis before. 

Travis licks his top lip nervously and then holds the takeout bag out to Nolan at arm's length, Nolan’s door jamb still between them, like Nolan’s contagious and Travis doesn’t want to get too close or something. 

Nolan shifts his jaw and takes the bag. “Thanks,” he says, and then steps back and shuts the door. 

Travis is right--none of the foods from their favorite sushi place are on Nolan’s shitty ass migraine diet plan of the week. But it isn’t working anyway, because Nolan’s seeing light spots and has a dull throb at the top of his skull, which means his pain is about to get bad.

So Nolan says fuck it and sprawls out on his couch and gorges himself on sushi like he’s a girl in a rom com with a pint of ice cream, and then he and orders seven pairs of super short shorts.

“I'm done with all this fucking straight ass bullshit,” he texts Nico. 

Nico writes back right away, “Freaking rights!” and then calls Nolan before he can respond. “What do you mean, though?”

What Nolan means is that ever since he got to Philly he’s spent all this time acting like he’s not into what he’s into, and he’s just fucking over it. He was pretty out back home--to his whole family, like, fucking second cousins and shit, even, and to basically all his buddies, but he’d just never really wanted to go to the trouble of being out in the NHL, when there wasn’t really any benefit to it. He tells all that to Nico, loud and ranting, and then, before he can stop himself, his voice slips out, stupid and sad, with, “I figured once me and Travis got together then I would do it then. Like, with him.” 

“That’s so sweet,” Nico coos in his hopeless-romantic voice. 

Nolan rolls his eyes. “But fuck that,” he says. Because not being out has gotten him nowhere but sick and stuck at home and miles away from where he wants to be with Travis. And Travis can keep acting like they’re just bros and everything is chill, like neither of them are into each others’ dicks, but Nolan is just fucking done. 

He tells Nico all that, and then tells him about the shorts. 

“Oh,” Nico says in this voice like, ‘I don’t even know where to start,’ “But. You know wearing shorts doesn’t make you any more gay than TK, right? I mean--that doesn’t make you gay at all.”

Nolan scowls into the phone, because he doesn’t want his big vengeful gay moment ruined. “Shut up,” he says. 

Nolan paid extra for shipping, so his packages are waiting outside his door two days later. He brings them all into his bedroom and tears into the boxes; rips the tape off loudly and ignores the way the chemical-y smell of it cuts into his nose a little and then lays out his version of a rainbow of shorts on the bed. He got a few pairs of just black and gray, because even if he’s going crazy he’s still himself, and then purple, what the website called “mauve,” and one pair that’s striped with teal and pink and yellow and white. 

One of Nolan’s care team people is coming over in an hour to drop off more food and ask him questions about how his symptoms have been lately, and they’ve all signed a thousand NDAs anyway, so he decides to just--go for it a little. He tears the tags off the purple shorts and pulls them on. Then he grabs the “Babe” shirt Travis gave him out of his dresser, finds a sharp pair of scissors, and cuts it in half. 

Nolan can’t tell if he looks ridiculous or not. The shorts are tight on his ass and so short that he couldn't wear boxers under them. Which he doesn't try, because he doesn't wear boxers anyway and also the last time he wore underwear was the last time he left the house. Which was like, weeks ago. The shirt shows a few inches of his stomach when he has his arms down, but if he puts them above his head it rides up high on his ribs. Nolan doesn’t have crazy abs like some guys in the league, but he thinks his stomach looks okay in the shirt, and his thighs are like, one of his best features, in his opinion, so. 

When he lets Micki, one of his PTs, in, she gives him a quick little raised eyebrow, and then just says, "You're looking cute today!" in her usual super chipper voice.

“Thanks,” Nolan says, ducking his head, then kind of follows her to the kitchen and watches as she stocks his fridge, because hiding out in the living room would basically defeat the purpose of getting all dressed. “Is it nice out today?” he mumbles. 

“No, it’s freezing.” She gives him a friendly kind of up and down look and smiles as she tells him, “Do not go out in that or you will literally die.” 

Micki continues with her usual friendly chatter. Nolan is mostly quiet, which all the staff are used to by now, as he leans on the counter and looks down at his thighs and really doesn’t feel any different.

There’s another knock only a few minutes after Micki leaves. Nolan rolls himself off the couch, feeling drowsy and at maybe a five on the pain scale. He’s still wearing his ridiculous, like, gay pride or whatever outfit, but he figures fuck it, the postman or his landlady can deal with him. 

And then he opens the door and there’s Travis, dressed in tight jeans and a Flyers hoodie and holding a little cardboard box.

He starts talking as soon as Nolan cracks the door open. “Hey Patty, I--” And then he sees Nolan, and does the most visible double take Nolan’s ever seen. He opens his mouth up, licks his lips, and just looks. 

Yes, Nolan thinks. This is what he wanted to feel. Fucking seen and obvious and sexy, or as sexy as he can feel when he has a fairly bad migraine. Under Travis’ eyes he feels like the sun is touching every inch of his exposed skin, like he’s floating down a river on an inner tube, relaxed and easy and slowly burning up. 

Nolan props his elbow up in the doorway above his head, stretching out for Travis like a cat in a sunbeam. 

Travis gapes at him. Fucking just does not stop staring. And Nolan just stands there and wonders how obvious his half hard dick is in his shorts and thinks, yeah, yeah, yes.

"Hey Patty," Travis says again. 

“Hi Teeks,” Nolan says.

“Yeah,” Travis breathes, and his voice is so hot , like he and Nolan are saying dirty fucking shit to each other instead of just nothing. 

“I hope that isn’t a box of Etsy shit for me,” Nolan says, joking like he would have before things got weird between them, because with Travis here in front of him looking at him like he’s a dream, he doesn’t even remember the last two months. 

And then Travis blinks, holds his eyes closed for a long second, and then opens them and looks up at Nolan’s face. "Dude, what are you wearing?" he asks, half of his mouth twisting up in a smile, like Nolan's outfit is just a joke.

Nolan takes his arm off the door and wraps it around his stomach before he can tell himself not to. Travis frowns, but all he says is, “And it is Etsy shit. I accidentally got it sent to my place.” 

Nolan wants to cry. He wants to change into sweats and a hoodie. He wants to tell Travis, ‘I don’t want it.' But mostly he just wants to shut the door on Travis so he can pretend this didn’t happen. 

So he pulls the box out of Travis’ arms with one hand and then says “Thanks,” and shuts the door before Travis can answer, same thing he did a fucking week ago when Travis brought him sushi.

He’s feeling sad and sorry for himself and rejected when he slams the box down on the counter and cuts it open with a steak knife. He throws a fistfull of packing peanuts so hard it makes his shoulder hurt, and then pulls out this stupid ass little hook thing made out of plastic with a soft sillicone part on the end. Nolan has to read the back of the package to figure out that it’s a “jaw stretcher” that you’re supposed to use twice a day to prevent tension build up, and by the time he’s done reading, he’s just fucking pissed. 

He takes a picture of the thing on Snap, types so angrily he makes like ten mistakes and has to fix them, and only hesitates for another second before sending the picture to Travis, the words big and white: “Stretch your own jaw out and suck my fucking dick.”

Then he uninstalls Snap and goes to bed, and doesn’t sleep. He lays with his eyes closed doing his dumb sleeping exercises--counting, making lists of all the songs he knows or all the towns he’s been to or whatever other mind numbing shit he can think of--but by three a.m., he gives up, and grabs his phone.

It’ll make his head worse, for sure, but he figures fuck it, and an hour later, he messages some chick on Craigslist and commits to buy one of her pregnant labradoodle’s puppies from her in three months once it’s born and old enough to leave its mom.

It’s fucking dumb. He can barely take care of himself, can barely drag himself out of bed or make himself do basic shit like eating three meals and showering. 

He can’t stand being around just himself anymore; can’t stand not having, like, fucking goals and tasks besides just barely keeping himself alive. 

He’s got a daily schedule, courtesy of the Flyers’ medical staff, hung up on his fridge with a magnet Travis got him from Etsy forever ago, a picture of the two of them at Claude’s wedding printed on it. 

The schedule’s, like, the only thing that keeps him from just lying on his couch and doing so much nothing that whole weeks go by and end up feeling like two hours. 

He’s supposed to wake up at eight and eat breakfast at exactly eight-thirty; only team approved meals, no caffeine. No bright lights until at least nine, no screens until ten. 

If he feels up to it, he works out in his building’s gym from ten to twelve, and there’s a separate schedule from the Flyers that tells him which workouts he should do every day.

Lunch is at exactly twelve, dinner’s at six, bed at ten. 

There are gaps in the schedule, obviously, so he’s got another list from his sports psych with a bunch of ideas for how he can fill his free time. There’s a bunch of low stress, relaxing things that don’t involve screens and that Nolan would never in a million fucking years want to do: yoga, deep breathing, mediation, journaling, learning to cook team approved recipes, painting or drawing, rearranging his apartment. “Find time to do something you enjoy for at least 15 minutes every day,” the paper says at the bottom, and Nolan can’t bear to fucking read that sentence without feeling so pathetic he wants to throw up. 

So, like. A dog’s something to keep him company; maybe make him feel like there’s a point in getting out of bed; something to give him, like, purpose, or whatever, and fuck, doesn’t he sound like the most pathetic WAG in the world. 

He kind of can’t imagine taking care of a puppy right now, and hopefully three months will be enough time to get himself, like, somewhat pulled together. 

He finally gives up on sleep and gets out of bed at six the next morning. Grabs his bag and takes a funky smelling Uber to the airport and feels like he’s going to pass out as he walks through crowds of people under fluorescent lights. He puts a black eye mask on as soon as he’s in his seat--not a Travis gift, because fuck Travis and also fuck wearing handmade sushi printed shit in public--and then holds his hand over his nose for the whole flight so that he can smell his own skin and sweat and pretend to not notice the chemical, recycled scent of the air feeling like it’s stuffing his head with that pink insulation with little shards of glass in it. 

By the time he stumbles off the plane and into baggage claim to find his mom and dad, he has the worst migraine of his life.

His parents are excited to see him, smiling and waving happily, but they seem to read the careful way he’s holding his head, dropped low on his neck to get further away from the light; to balance himself a little, and so instead of the happy, huggy reunion that they all three deserve, his dad nods at him and goes to grab his suitcase off the carousel and his mom says, “Hi, Noly,” and puts her palm right at the top of his spine, her touch barely there but strong and steady enough to lead him through swirls of people and out into the freezing parking garage that smells like exhaust and gas and metal, and then finally into the front seat of his mom’s SUV, which smells like nothing. 


	3. Chapter 3

Nolan is so desperate to put off another flight for as long as possible that he gets permission to stay in Winnipeg through to American Thanksgiving. 

He spends his first week at his parents’ place moping around like he got fucking dumped, napping on the couch with the sounds of his family around him, and getting rats nests he was too out of it to deal with gently brushed out of his hair by his mom. 

Then he reinstalls Snap, leaves three messages from Travis unopened, and starts posting stupid thirst trap selfies on his story every day for no good fucking reason. 

When he gets the call from his coach almost a month after leaving Philly, he’s got about 200 screenshot notifications from Travis, is bored out of his fucking mind, and hasn’t had a migraine in three days.

***

Travis opens Patty’s Snap story already knowing it’s going to be too fucking hot. And shit  _ is  _ it: Patty sitting shirtless on a weight machine, legs spread around a black leather bench, thighs flexed and so fucking  _ thick.  _ Travis is at home in bed, which is great because it’s really not a good idea for him to look at this kind of picture of Patty in public (although it hasn’t stopped him yet, because Travis just doesn’t have the self control to see a new story from him and  _ not  _ move his thumb at the speed of light to click on it). 

Travis presses his hand to his dick once, just,  _ yeah yeah, I hear ya,  _ and then he just looks at Pat’s story for a long ass time. Takes in every detail of Patty--his thighs, obviously, and the bulk of his shoulders and chest next to the taper of his waist, and then the way he’s holding his neck and the exact set of his mouth, loose and casual, which means he’s not in pain. Travis lets that move through him, relief and happiness, then clicks into their chat.

His stupid apologies to Pat are still saved (and still unopened), because, yeah, looking at them makes Travis feel like the biggest dumb ass, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true, or that Pat doesn’t deserve them. He deserves so much  _ more  _ than just Travis’, “I’m sorry I’ve been a shitty friend and everything sucks. I seriously hate that you have to deal with any of this. I wish I could make it better for you,” “I actually would suck your dick if that would help,” “I hope you’re safe in Wini. Miss you like crazy.” 

Patty doesn’t have to even open the messages for Travis to know basically what he would say to all that: “Fuck you,” “Shut up,” and “ _ You  _ miss  _ me?  _ Fuck  _ off.” _

Travis isn’t stupid. He knows why Pat’s mad at him. Knows that he’s being a shitty friend by abandoning Patty when he’s already been forced to stop hanging out with the team every day and when he’s going through so much shit. Knows that, however much Pat likes to pretend he loves spending time alone, he probably would rather have Travis chilling out with him than sitting in his apartment two floors away ordering gifts for him. 

The thing is, Travis is a great guy to be around when things are fun and easy, but he’s the last person people should be with when they need quiet and calm. Patty  _ knows  _ that. Travis has seen that interview where Patty got asked to describe him a hundred times, has the exact way Pat says, "someone who's nonstop," burned into his brain.

Travis has read pages and pages about migraines in the last few months, all about the causes and the things that make them worse--loud noise, too much movement, high energy activities. Basically, Travis’ whole deal.

He knows that if he's around Patty now, he'll do something wrong--piss him off or hurt him or just make it obvious to him how unfit Travis is for actual adult life and serious companionship and all that, and then he’ll lose Pat forever. So it’s better for him to just give Patty some space to heal, and try to help him without getting too close, even though it sucks fucking ass, because then once Pat's better they can go back to exactly how they were before. 

Travis wants to explain that to Pat, wants to say so many things into the void of their chat. ‘Dude I know it sucks but I swear it’s good for you to not be around me right now,’ ‘I promise I’ll be back with you once you’re feeling better,’ ‘I’m bi and I like you hbu?,’ ‘Please please call me so I can hear your voice.’ But all he does is stare at his apologies, scroll up to look at a few of their old jokes that are saved, too, and then reopen Pat’s story to take a screenshot. 

It’s about his thousandth screenshot off Patty’s Snapchat, and that might be embarrassing if Travis was the kind of guy who got embarrassed or if there was any way that Pat didn’t already know how thirsty Travis was for him. 

In the three weeks since Pat left Philly to stay with his parents, Travis has spent hours drooling over Patty’s snaps. Always glaring, usually into the same bathroom mirror, his big lips pressed together, never even a hint of a smile on them. His hair always a different variety of smoking hot: hanging over his eyes dripping wet from a shower, greasy and shoved back, wavy and wild like he just woke up, stringy and flat with sweat. He posts some pics of himself in workout gear and tight ass jeans and sweat pants and no shirt, but usually, he’s wearing a plain tee and some bright colored short-ass-fucking-shorts. It’s  _ November  _ in  _ Manitoba,  _ but Pat is dressing like it’s a thousand fucking degrees out. 

Add all those screenshots to the whole slew of pictures Travis has taken or downloaded off news articles, and Travis has got a whole creepy-ass, embarrassing-as-anything folder labeled “Patty” on his phone. 

Pat when he first joined the team, short hair and pink cheeks, when he was only 18 and looked all fucking clean cut; Pat sprawled out cocky in their hotel room after a win; Pat scowling after a loss. Pat holding a tiny little dog at some NHL media thing, his hands so huge they wrap all the way around its body. (That one really gets Travis, because he’s small and one time Kevin told him he looked like a chihuahua.)

Travis’ favorite picture is one of those moving iPhone ones that he’d never seen the point of until one day he was joking around with Pat, pretending to be some crazy fan wanting a photo, saying weird shit and climbing all over Patty on his couch with his camera pointed at him. Pat shoved him off eventually, rolling his eyes, and Travis pulled open his gallery to delete all the blurry pictures he’d snapped because somehow even though none of the other guys on the team ever had a problem with it, Travis was constantly running out of storage on his phone. 

And then there was Pat  _ laughing _ , lips pulling back from his teeth and head tilting to the side, his eyes looking past the camera, up to where Travis had been. 

Travis stared at the picture with his lips parted for long enough that Pat leaned over to see it. He made his harumph-y noise and told Travis, “Delete it,” his voice just on the happier side of deadpan. 

“This is so fucking rare,” Travis had said, unable to look away from his phone screen where Pat’s eyes crinkled until they were nearly closed, that sweet laugh Tavis was always working to get from Patty captured right there. 

If Travis didn’t work with a group of immature guys who think nothing of stealing each others’ phones, that’s the one he would set as his wallpaper. 

So, basically, Travis could  _ really  _ embarrass himself with all the minute, super specific details he found hot about Patty and with the fucking extensive collection of pictures of Pat he has on his phone.

What he doesn’t have a picture of--but absolutely does  _ not  _ need one of, because the image is fucking  _ burned  _ into his fucking brain anyway, is Patty in bright purple shorts that show basically every inch of his thighs and a shirt that  _ Travis bought him  _ cut up so that his whole stomach is on display. Patty arching his back and sliding his elbow up his door frame until he’s spread out before Travis like a fucking  _ feast.  _ The outline of Pat’s dick so fucking obvious against his thigh, so close to the bottom hem of his shorts that Travis got hard standing in the hallway just gaping at him and hoping Patty would shift his leg just a little so Travis could see the head of his cock. 

Travis had come to Pat’s door expecting--just--abso _ lute _ ly not that. Pat was always sexy to Travis, but he was usually sexy in like, a chill, familiar, sometimes even kind of bro-y way. But that day he was just  _ obscene.  _

Travis had accidentally gotten one of the migraine things he’d ordered Pat mailed to his own apartment. He was missing Pats bad, missing sprawling out with him on one of their couches, playing video games and talking, petting Patty’s hair and letting Patty hug him, playing hockey with him, fucking around on the ice. Just, fucking. Missing being around his best friend and his--whatever else. 

He’d spent an hour doing an extra workout, trying to wear himself out, and then he’d showered, and gone downstairs, and told himself over and over in his head,  _ be quiet, be calm, don’t be a dick. _

It was all a waste of fucking time, because his head just fuckin’  _ emptied  _ the second Pat opened the door, his whole fucking body on display and his head held weird and careful, like even the air was hurting him, the same way he’d moved that night after Claude’s party. 

But still Travis had wanted to shove Patty back into the apartment and yank his little shorts off his hips and push him down on the floor and sit on his face backwards so he could eat Travis out while Travis fucking  _ swallowed  _ his dick. 

And that was  _ not  _ the shit he was supposed to be thinking, especially now, so he tried to play it cool, like Pat was any other guy on the team and not the hottest thing Travis had ever seen and not like as far as Travis’s stupid little caveman brain was concerned Pat was more than halfway to being his boyfriend. 

So he just did what he always did and made it a joke. Said, “Dude, what are you wearing?” in this voice like he thought Pat was trying to be funny, or like he’d accidentally put on someone else’s clothes. 

And he’d have known it was wrong even without Patty’s reaction, the way his posture went from sexy to defensive and embarrassed, even without the angry text he got from Pat when he was back in his apartment twenty minutes later. 

So Travis feels like shit, and he misses Pat every second of every day--misses him skating ahead of Travis on the ice, getting himself in the perfect positions to take Travis’ passes, misses him sitting right next to Travis in the locker room or out with the guys, their conversations so full of inside jokes that the Claude just begs them to shut up and act normal. 

But added into that freaky swamp of emotions that are honestly way too complicated for Travis is the fact that he’s super fucking horny for Pat all the fucking time. Hot for him in a different way than he ever has been for anyone before. 

At least  _ that  _ Travis can figure out, though.

So: One day when he’s looking on Etsy for cute cards for his mom and more migraine shit for Pats (because yeah it's pretty obvious that Pat hates it but Travis doesn't know how to not give him stuff right now), he also orders himself an eight-inch, hand-molded dildo. 

***

Three days later, Travis’s got a package from the inconspicuously named HandMadeGoods sitting outside his door. He unwraps it, gives it a cursory glance over-- _ yep, looks like a dick _ \--and then washes it off in his kitchen sink and sprints into his bedroom. 

He doesn’t have to think to figure out where he wants his mind to go as he fingers himself open. Pat in his purple short shorts was shockingly hot, and every Snap of him since has been insane, but Travis’ mind goes back to the summer, when Patty came up to Travis’ lake house and spent a week with him there.

On his last night, he and Travis stayed up until dawn sitting around the fire. 

Early in the evening, Travis was buzzed and feeling half hyper and giddy and half fucking bummed about Pat leaving. 

Being bummed is not really Travis’ natural state, though, so he was going with the hyper, chasing around his parents’ dog, Copper, who was also staying with him for the week, getting Copper riled up and making himself out of breath, yelling occassional comments to Pat where he was sprawled on a bench by the bonfire Travis had started after he and Pat spent ten minutes arguing about the best way to arrange the logs, beer on his knee, one sandalled foot propped up against the bricks stacked up around the fire pit. 

Travis was chasing Copper around trying to get his slobbery rope toy back when Pat reached behind the bench as Travis passed and caught his wrist. “Calm the fuck  _ down, _ ” he said, his voice low and grumbly but not too annoyed, and he kept his fingers around Travis’ wrist and pulled him around the bench. Travis let himself go, watched as Copper forgot about him and started tossing the rope around on his own, and when Pat pulled him down he didn’t pay attention to where he was landing until suddenly he was pressed up against Pat, their legs right next to each other from hip to knee, their arms tacking together with sweat. Pat gave him a flat look out of the corner of his eye, taking him in and looking lazy and like he would probably be okay with staying pressed up against him, and so Travis just didn’t move.

He and Patty sat on the bench for hours, drinking and looking at the fire, getting closer and closer together as it got cold, although Travis fucking hoped that Patty didn’t think that was the reason Travis was pressing into his side, hanging his legs over one of Pat's knees, then tucking his feet up between Pat's legs and under one thigh, his whole body seizing with how close he was to Pat; to Pat’s  _ dick.  _

Pat didn’t do a thing to move away from Travis. Just spread his thighs even wider, propped and arm along the back of the bench behind Travis, and talked in his low, vibrating voice. Kept pulling beers out of the cooler next to his feet and handing them to Travis so he didn’t have to get up and told Travis all this serious shit he never talked about, how he was dying to finally have a good season with no injuries so people would stop thinking he was a waste of a draft pick and how he was sick of hurting all the time. 

Travis was fucking terrible at serious conversations, but Pat’s slow, quiet voice somehow drug it out of him. He started with just, “I know, buddy, I want you out there, too,” and ended up staring into the fire as he told Pat, “I get nervous everyone on the team thinks I’m super dumb.” 

And then eventually they just stopped talking and sat there quietly, twisted together and staring at the bonfire as it burned down. It was freezing. Pat had a hoodie on that smelled like smoke, and Travis’ toes were warm under his thigh, but when he curled closer and brushed his nose against Pat’s neck, Patty shivered. “You’re fucking ice,” he’d said, and then put and arm around Travis’ neck to keep his face pressed against his throat. Travis pressed his lips there, not a kiss, just contact, causal, maybe, because there was really nowhere else for his lips to go.

“ _ You  _ are,” he said stupidly, Pat’s stubble brushing over his lips and making his dick, which had been hard against his thigh ever since he’d started touching Pat, really start to throb. Pat laughed, and Travis felt that, too. 

“You’re ready for bed, bud.” 

Travis was drunk, and it was starting to get lighter out, even though they couldn’t see the sun yet. He could feel cold dew settling around them, start to hear a few birds making noise.

He had that loopy, drained, fucked-up feeling that came with pulling an all-nighter. He tipped his head back onto Pat’s bicep and said, his voice scratchy from smoke and talking for so long, “I don’t want to miss you.” 

It didn’t really make sense, but Pat just said, "Yeah," his voice so deep it was like an earthquake, and yanked Travis even tighter against him and let Travis sit there until the sun rose and they both had to go inside to shower the smell of woodsmoke off of them before Travis drove Patty to the airport. 

It’s a big memory. Definitely not a  _ normal  _ sexual fantasy, and not something Travis would even in a million years admit to thinking about as he opens himself up on his fingers, but it's something Travis thinks about a lot both in general and when he wants to get off not quick and to the point but special and slow. Thinks about being so close to Pat, about the couple times he was convinced he could feel the head of Pat's dick pressing against his ankle. About the warm, rough rumble of Pat's throat. About Patty's big hand cupping the back of Travis's head, everything about him making Travis feel small. 

(Travis has never loved feeling short or being smaller than most of the guys he played with, but the specific way that Pat makes him feel tiny is just fucking ridiculous.)

And then it spins out from there: Travis pressing his lips to Pat's neck for real, licking his tongue up it and tasting smoke and salt. Pat tugging Travis over his lap like it's nothing, opening Travis’ pants and pulling his dick out. 

Travis slides his hand slow up and down his own cock, slicking it with lube. He wonders if they sell like, fake hands on his new favorite Etsy sex toy shop, because he really needs a bigger one to make this more realistic. Needs a palm that will dwarf his cock, even though he’s not small there. Needs fingers way thicker and longer than his own to stretch his ass.

He has stop himself from grabbing his phone and searching Etsy for "fake hand sex toy" right then and to instead get the job done with his own fingers. He gets himself open and slick and then sits up on his knees and holds the dildo under him with one hand and slides down on it. It’s got a suction cup at the base, and he’s definitely going to be using that in the future, but for now he just wants to pretend he’s on Pat's lap, Pat's big cock tight and hot inside Travis while Travis rides him.

Travis has never been  _ that  _ into bottoming before. He's known he was bi basically since forever, and he's been with plenty of dudes and done everything there is to do, but he's never felt like he needed anything in his ass when he was alone. 

But sliding all the way down a big-headed silicone dick and closing his eyes and pretending it’s Patty’s is fucking  _ crazy.  _ Stretch and slide and sensation so heavy it makes his legs twitch. 

Travis hasn’t ever used a dildo on his own before, so it takes him a minute to learn how to coordinate the hand holding the base with the up and down movement of his thighs with the hand jerking his dick, but once he gets it down he’s just  _ dying  _ with it, his nipples tingling and his cock aching and his ass clenching, and he knows long before he even comes that it’s going to be so good he’s going to be wiped out after. 

And it fucking  _ is.  _ He teases himself for as long as he can stand, but he really needs another person with much better self control--say, Patty--there with him if he wants to do a good job of edging himself, so after only a few minutes he’s speeding up on the dildo, riding it as hard as he can, his hand blurring up and down his cock, noisy with lube and precum, and when he comes he leans all the way forward until his whole face is smothered in his comforter, and says “  _ Pat _ ,” loud and slow, just to feel it. 

Travis realizes the whole thing was a mistake as soon as he pulls the dildo out of his ass and drops it on the bed next to him. Maybe it would’ve been okay if he’d thought about the short shorts, or about some hypothetical future where everything’s good and Patty’s fucking him happily and healthily. But he shouldn’t have gotten so in his feelings, so sappy and sweet and moody with the memory of Pat leaving him in the summer, because after he lets himself really think about not just how much he misses his buddy, how hot Pat is, how much he wants to keep playing hockey with him--when he thinks about not just that, but also how perfect Pat is for Travis and how much Travis fucking loves him, he goes from being bummed and horny and anxious to have Patty back, to just being fucking sad.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I meant for this to be a lighter chapter but I think it might be the saddest one yet? 😂 
> 
> (Btw, in case you haven't noticed, I've totally given up on my goal to have this fic done in four chapters because I fell too in love with these boys and also i just cannot write anything short 🙄)

There’s 2,621 kilometers between Pat’s parents’ place in Winnipeg and the apartment building he and Travis live in during the season in Philly. 

Travis shouldn’t have looked it up, because it’s pathetic and dumb and because what does it fucking matter? It hurts to be in Philly, and it hurts to be in Saint Louis, and it hurts to be in Winnipeg, strapping his pads on for a game and knowing he’s only 14.6 kilometers away from Patty. 

Travis comes off the first period soaked all the way to his scalp with sweat and pissed about already giving away two goals. He’s on the bench in front of his stall rambling to Jake and Carter about the shitty period and what they need to do in the second and how much he hates the Jets, and they’re just nodding and mostly ignoring him, like you do with an annoying kid who needs to tire himself out, and then someone over by the door says, “Patty!” 

Travis looks up so fast his neck cracks, and then there’s Pat, zero fucking kilometers away, slapping hands with Claude and saying, “Yeah, thought I’d come see how bad you guys could play without me.” 

Pat's not wearing one of his crazy Snapchat outfits, he’s just got on black jeans and a grey Flyers hoodie, but even in that, all Travis can do is stare at him with his mouth open and his head fucking rattling with how much stupid shit he’s thinking, fast and chaotic:  _ Patty, Pat, Patso, Nolan. Shit he looks so  _ good  _. He obviously has a migraine, though, why is he here if he has a migraine? Fuck I fucking  _ miss him. 

He wants to go up to Pat, hug him and kiss him and slide his hands up under his hoodie, feel the heat of his bare skin and tell him I'm sorry, I love you, I miss you.

All he actually does is sits on the bench and watches as Patty makes his way around the edge of the room, moving a little careful and with his eyes tight enough that Travis feels like it should be obvious to everyone that he’s in pain. But everynone just stands up from the bench as Pat pauses in front of their stalls, slaps hands with him and asks him how he’s been. Travis just waits, his lungs heavy as he counts down the number of guys between them--six, five, four, three, two, one.

“Sup, Jakey,” Pat says, and Jake stands up and wraps him in a bear hug. Pat laughs against his shoulder, and Travis is staring straight up at him feeling like he’s looking at the sun. Jake gives Patty a rough pat on the back and sits back down, and Travis sits there and waits, feeling tense and crazy, like he’s at the draft waiting to get picked or something. 

And then Patty’s eyes skip over to Carter, his gaze just glancing off Travis, and Travis can’t make himself stand up but he  _ can’t  _ let Pat just walk by him.

“Hey, Patty,” he says when Pat is right in front of him, mid step. He tries to make his voice--who fucking knows. Soft and nice and apologetic, and also normal and friendly, but it just comes out sounding weird. 

Pat cuts his eyes to Travis like he’s just said something stupid, giving Travis his absolutely perfect narrow-eyed bitch face. “You feeling okay?” Travis asks, because he’s fucking dying to know the answer. To that, and to a million other questions-- _ how long till you’re back, are we still friends, do you hate me. _

Pat looks at him for another second, his eyes distant and dismissive even before they trail off Travis’ face. “Yeah, Teeks, feeling great,” he says flatly, and then moves on to bro-hug Carter. 

“That was weird,” Jake says from the bench next to Travis, and Travis looks over to find Jake frowning like there’s a math problem he can’t figure out.

Travis doesn’t really care about helping Jake figure out the problem of him and Pat when  _ he  _ has no idea how it all works out either and when all he can think is how  _ fucked up  _ things are between them. 

He knows he can't have Pat with him in practice or on the ice, for now, and that's really fucking shitty, but it's hockey, and he’s not Sidney Crosby, so hockey is not the most important thing in Travis’ life. And he doesn't love thinking about it, but it's crossed his mind before that one of them could get traded, that eventually they'll have to retire and it's possible they'll have to play for different teams and live in different cities before they do. But even then, he always imagined talking to Pat every night on the phone, chilling when they played against each other, spending the summers together at Travis' cabin or something. And he hates thinking about being done with hockey, but for the last year, thinking about post-retirement life has been okay, because he's imagined it like this: him and Patty, sitting together on the boat. Pat being bitchy and getting sunburnt, the two of them catching a huge crop of rainbows to grill up. Pat lounging around on the deck back at the cabin in a tiny swimsuit, drinking beer and chirping Travis while Travis cleans the fish, until Travis finally gets sick of him and climbs in his lap to shut him up. 

And before, none of that seemed like a crazy fantasy--it just seemed like a plan. Even though obviously Travis knew he and Pat weren’t together yet (because you can’t be  _ together  _ with another guy when neither of you have even told the other you’re into dudes, right?) because as far as Travis was concerned, he was Pat’s, and he didn’t give a shit if they’d never kissed or if they weren’t officially each others’ boyfriends or even if Pat didn’t like him. They spent most of their time as close together as they could get, and Travis hadn’t dated or hooked up with anyone else in almost a year--hadn’t even wanted to--and he’d stopped trying to be subtle about how into Patty he was forever ago. So maybe they were going slower than most people, but Travis didn’t mind that when he could already see all the years and years they had ahead of them, all the time they’d have to be together in every way they wanted. 

But with Pat standing across the locker room from Travis, his face cool and placid as he talks to Claude and his eyes not even glancing toward Travis, he feels like all that is a potential future he fucked up and missed out on. 

  
  


They end up losing the game 3-7, which is a shitty humiliating scoreline, and Travis feels bad that he played dumb and distracted for the whole second period, but mostly he’s just thinking about how Pat is  _ right there,  _ about how he always listens to Travis after a loss, always has the same bitchy, unflappable look on his face no matter how bad Travis played, and he’s just dying to hear Pat's voice talking to him like he used to.

He doesn’t look away from Patty as he mills around the locker room chatting with a few of the coaches while all the guys who played strip out of their gear, and so he sees when Pat steps through a doorway into the small bathroom inside the locker room, and he gets up, half undressed, and follows. 

The lights in the bathroom are off, so it’s darkish, just muted light spilling in from the open doorway to the rest of the locker room.

Pat is leaning heavily on the sink, his arms straight and tense, his head tipped forward so his hair hangs down over his face, and Travis goes from determined and needy to so concerned he feels sick with it. 

“Hey, are you good, buddy?” his voice low and soft.

Patty shoves himself off the sink and turns his head to glare at Travis, his movements twitchy, pain obvious in every inch of his body. “Don’t fucking start,” he snarls, bringing a hand up to press against his own temple and leaning his head into his palm. And Travis doesn’t know how he didn’t see it before, across the locker room or on Snapchat or when Patty was standing right in front of him, but Pat has circles around his eyes like he’s never slept in his life. 

Travis takes in a breath. “Patty, I’m really sorry I’ve been shitty, but--”

Pat cuts him off with a vicious look. “I’m obviously dying to hear your fucking excuses, but I’m really not feeling it right now, so," he says, his voice cutting. He starts to walk past Travis, moving just a little off balance.

“Okay, let me just--”

“You’ve been ignoring me two fucking months so can you just _shut_ _up_ now? If you wanted to talk so bad then you should’ve--” he cuts himself off quick and sets his jaw, and Travis’ eyes get sore. “Just, fuck off.”

Pat walks out of the bathroom, and Travis doesn’t know what to do but let him. 

Travis’ whole problem this whole time has been that he can’t figure out how to stop being someone who just takes and takes and takes from Patty, that he doesn’t know how to be around Pat and not just touch him and talk to him and beg for more from him and ask him a thousand fucking questions until Travis’ voice hurts and Pat’s head hurts and Patty’s glaring at him like Travis is a reporter who won't shut up, and he  _ knows  _ he’s shitty for not explaining all that to Patty, 

But it’s like--like Patty doesn’t know that  _ obviously  _ Travis  _ wanted _ to be around him this whole fucking time, like he wasn’t dying every day they were apart and he didn’t know if Nolan was okay or hurting or  _ what.  _

but it’s fucking embarrassing. Like, how’s he supposed to tell the person he wants to love him that he’s such a fuckup. 

One of his old coaches, back in Ontario, was awful--didn’t know anything about hockey, only ever gave them cheesy lines. But he used to always say, “You just have to keep working harder.” 

Getting to the NHL wasn't easy; scoring 24 goals last season wasn't easy. Travis isn't that smart, and he's not great at emotions, but he's awesome at fucking grinding things out.

And he can't just wait for Patty to be better or for himself to be quieter anymore, because obviously it's making both of them miserable. 

So he heads back to his hotel room (21.7 kilometers from Patty), and starts figuring it the fuck out. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is inspired by [Nolan being an absolute bitch](https://bretthowden.tumblr.com/post/172999085769/nbc-sports-philadelphia-postgame-nolan-patrick)   
>    
> 

Nolan gets back to Philly on a return flight only about half as painful as his flight out to Winnipeg.

He’d kind of thought going home would be, like, healing or cleansing or any of that stuff that deep emotional people always talk about. But really, he gets back to his apartment building mostly the same guy as he was when he left: still getting migraines and still fucking lost over Travis, except now he knows that he loves short shorts, is not so into crop tops, and is not at  _ all  _ into eyeliner. 

He came to the first two realizations thanks to Snapchat and mirror selfies, and the last one thanks to his sisters begging to give him a _ makeover  _ one night when he was too lazy to resist. 

It had been pretty tame, compared to what they could have done. Just a line of black around his eyelids that made him feel _so_ stupid, some chapstick making his lips look shiny, and tons of brushing and spraying his hair that didn’t really make it look any different than it normally did. 

Short shorts, though, he can get on fucking board with.

It’s like the first time he dressed for a Flyers game. Got on all his pads and an orange and black uniform with his name and number on it and a stick that had been cut specifically for him. He’d known he was going to be drafted into the NHL for years, had  _ gotten  _ drafted months before he first fully dressed up, but it wasn’t until he had everything on that he actually really felt like Nolan Patrick, number 19, first round draft pick for the Philadelphia Flyers, and not just Patty.

It's the same deal with the shorts, except he's still missing that perfectly right,  _ yes this is who I'm supposed to be _ feeling he got in his doorway when Travis had been checking him out.

So, yeah, he’s learned a little more about himself, but he still has no idea what he’s supposed to fucking eat to stop getting migraines--like, he hadn’t even be able to sit through the Flyers-Jets game his coach has asked him to come to without getting migraine so bad he couldn’t walk right--and he has even less idea what the fuck is going on with Travis.

But he doesn't have too much time to think about that, because Travis knocks on the door to Nolan’s apartment three hours after Nolan lands in Philly. 

Travis is wearing close fitting jeans and a black snapback, he’s empty-handed, and he’s looking up at Nolan with his game face on. 

Nolan can’t have another shitty conversation in his doorway or he’ll start getting like PTSD flashbacks every time he walks into his apartment, so he moves to the side and lets Travis in before Travis even says anything. 

Nolan cried on the drive home from the Flyers game in Winnipeg. Because his head hurt so bad he couldn’t stand it, because it had really hit him how bad he missed his team, and because his whole conversation with Travis just fucking sucked. His dad had pulled the car over so his mom could crawl in the backseat with Nolan, and she’d scratched his back while he told her tearily, “Travis hasn’t been talking to me.”

His mom didn’t really need any more than that. She got what Travis was to him, even if he’d never told her. She’d pursed her lips like she was pissed and kept running her nails lightly across his shoulders and told him, “People who make you cry don’t deserve you.” 

Nolan wished he could believe that. Just convince himself that Travis wasn’t the person Nolan had always thought he was. That he wasn’t so loyal it was stupid, wasn’t the best person in the world at making Nolan have fun, wasn’t the only one outside Nolan’s family who knew exactly how to let Nolan be quiet when he wanted to but would listen to everything he said when he talked. That Travis didn’t care about him. But it was kind of impossible to buy all that when up until a few months ago Travis had always treated Nolan like he was, like, fucking  _ special _ . 

But also--how was he supposed to take the fact that Travis was acting like they’d never been anything except hockey bros, like now that they weren’t playing and practicing together there was nothing to their relationship. 

He shuts the door behind them and follows TK to the living room area. Travis sits down on the couch, angled toward Nolan, his back straight and tense. He frowns at Nolan as Nolan settles himself on the opposite end of the couch.

And then Travis asks, “You’re feeling okay right now, right?” his voice all gentle and careful, and it takes Nolan a second to get what he means.

Nolan’s head’s still a little fuzzy from the flight, but he’s been sitting in the dark of his apartment with peppermint oil smeared all over his neck for a couple hours, so he’s doing okay. But fuck Travis for asking him like he gives a  _ shit  _ how Nolan feels. “I don’t have a migraine,” he says flatly. “Thanks for being concerned.” 

Travis stands up abruptly to pace in front of the couch. “Jeez, Patty, you've gotta know I was never not  _ concerned  _ about you, I just--” Travis shakes his head and comes to stand right in front of Nolan, frowning down at him. “Look, this is so heavy and weird, but-- I’m really sorry for being a shitty friend.” He drags his eyes over Nolan’s face, and they’re more stressed looking than Nolan’s maybe ever seen them. 

“You’ve been a fucking  _ dick, _ ” Nolan says, his voice a notch louder than normal.

Travis runs a hand through his hair and drops his weight back into the couch, a foot closer to Nolan this time. “I know,” he says, his puppy dog brown eyes looking down at his lap and his voice is so transparently needy it hurts.

Nolan wishes he was the kind of guy who could just tell Travis “okay cool I forgive you,” pull him into his lap, and make out with him. And, like, he  _ could,  _ he guesses. It would be easy to grab his hips and move him, knock his hat off and tilt his head the way Nolan needed it. 

“Like, you fucking ignored me like we’re just little hockey buddies or some shit,” he tells Travis. And he feels like he’s peeling himself open; practically just straight up saying, “ _ but we’re supposed to be more than buddies. _ ”

And before he can accept Travis’ apology and move on, he kind of needs to hear Travis say that, too. Nolan’s not a big grudge guy--he gets annoyed with every single person he knows pretty much every day, so he’s gotten pretty used to getting over shit. 

But he can’t stop thinking that maybe Travis doesn’t want everything Nolan thought he did. Maybe he never wanted all that, and the reason he ditched Nolan was because he realized that Nolan was into him and got weirded out.

And the thing is, if Travis wants to be only buddies with Nolan, Nolan doesn’t know if he can do it, because the two of them have never been  _ just  _ friends, for him. 

Nolan had come into the NHL as the second overall draft pick and already carrying a little bit of an injury, but hockey had never really stressed him out, because Nolan didn’t really get stressed. He was pretty good at taking what came at him, doing what he could, and moving on if something went wrong. So he was ready to just put his head down and try to have a good rookie season, and yeah, he was pumped to play with guys like G who he'd been watching on TV for years, but he felt pretty chill about it in the months between the draft and his first actual NHL practice.

But on his first day in the Flyers locker room--which was objectively basically the same as every locker room Nolan had ever been in, except it was a little nicer and also had  _ Claude Giroux  _ in it--Nolan felt fucking  _ freaked.  _

Travis had come up to Nolan where he sat in his stall too in his head to even get up and cross the room to grab tape for his stick. 

Nolan had thought he was hot right away. He’d seen him on TV and online while he was trying to learn about the team, and he’d been hot there, but he was better in person, saying hi to Nolan in his raspy voice and standing above him and introducing himself like it was possible Nolan didn’t know his name, and just glowing olive skin and dark hair and this smile on his face like being happy was the easiest thing in the world. 

“Hey, nice to meet you. Travis,” he’d said, holding his hand out for Nolan to shake. 

“Pat,” Nolan said, reaching up to shake his hand, fumbling his fingers and ending up sort of creepily rubbing at Travis’ wrist with them. 

Travis had just kept smiling at him and squeezed his hand for a second before dropping it. “I like your hair now better than at the draft, man,” he said. “We’re kind of hair twins, huh?” He tilted his head and reached back to run his fingers through the hair at the back of his neck, where it was about the same length as Nolan’s, now that he'd grown it out again. 

“I guess so,” Nolan said, because no matter how nice or talkative or hot a guy was, Nolan was never in a million years going to be a guy anyone would describe as friendly or open or chatty. So he grabbed his tape, gave Travis a half nod, and then got to taping his stick, finally out of the weird stress-trance he’d been in. 

But then all through the rest of camp, he kept ending up close to Travis. It seemed random, like neither of them were trying to get paired together in drills or to be the last two in the shower or to ride stationary bikes next to each other, but it just kept happening, and whenever it did, Travis talked to Nolan, even when he had literally nothing to say. 

And by the end of camp when the staff switched the stalls around and did room assignments, Nolan got put next to Travis in the locker room and assigned to room with him on the road, and apparently everyone on the team had decided they were best friends. Even though Nolan didn’t really feel like he got Travis’ whole deal and was still freaking out about how many sex dreams he was having about Travis--about his  _ teammate _ \--and worrying about whether Travis noticed Nolan checking him out and also thinking a million times a day about actually playing a real NHL game. 

Their first game was a roadie. Travis hooked up an Xbox in their room and beat Nolan at some stupid game he liked over and over again until it was time to nap, and then they laid down on their beds across the room from each other, and Nolan felt more awake than he’d ever been in his life and Travis just fucking  _ rambled. _

Talked about fish he’d caught over the summer, a big buck his dad had gotten back from the taxidermist last week that he’d sent Travis a picture of, a prank his brother played on him when they were kids, some funny thing his roommate had said once in juniors. Just so much bullshit that it was exhausting, all in his up and down little voice, and then, just before their alarms were supposed to go off and wake them up, “Tell me how you’re gonna play tonight, bud.” 

Nolan hadn’t thought he’d wanted to talk. He’d never talked a lot before big games, always wanted to be quiet and alone. But Travis asked, and Nolan just opened his mouth and answered. “I don’t want to start off slow,” he said. “I just want to fucking  _ go. _ ” He stopped even pretending to try to sleep and sat up on the bed, looking over at Travis’s bed. Travis was lying under his comforter, head tipped to the side to look at Nolan, the same easy little smile he’d had basically since Nolan had known him on his face. So Nolan just kept going--telling Travis about plays he was going to try to make, how he was going to deal with guys on the other team, how pumped his family was going to be, watching him. “I’m gonna make Nico pissed about how good I am, Jersey's gonna be fucking embarrassed they picked him first," he said at the end, and Travis’ smile got bigger.

“Fucking rights,” he said. 

So him and Travis became, like, best friends or whatever, but even way at the beginning, they weren’t  _ just  _ that--he was Nolan’s best friend who Nolan thought was smoking hot, who he imagined sucking his dick, who he wanted to fuck, who he could imagine really  _ being with,  _ feeling comfortable with and not ever getting sick of. 

Travis was loud and had the dumbest sense of humor ever, and being around him made Nolan feel easy in a way none of the other guys did. And he had no idea what Travis liked about him, but there was clearly something, because Travis turned down invitations to go out with the guys on the team so he could hang out at Nolan’s apartment with him, turned down chicks at the bar who were practically like licking his ears and shit to go back to his and Nolan’s hotel room and lay on the bed across from Nolan’s and talk into the dark while Nolan mostly ignored him. He told Nolan, “I wish you were on my line, buddy,” even though the guys who were actually on his line were  _ Claude Giroux  _ and  _ Sean Couturier _ .

And eventually Nolan started thinking maybe Travis was into him, too. When Travis came out of the bathroom in their hotel room to find Nolan sprawled in bed in his underwear, his ran his eyes up Nolan’s legs for like fucking hours. He always hugged Nolan and hung off him and stood close to him in this way that just seemed a step past normal teammate stuff. He told Nolan he was so glad to have him on the team, that he hadn’t had a friend like Nolan since juniors, that he loved watching him play, that he would fuck up anyone who hurt Nolan on the ice. 

Nolan had been conflicted about it for a long time, telling himself that Travis wasn’t gay, that Nolan was misreading him. But by the end of this last season, there’d been too many obvious signs to ignore, and Nolan had finally been so convinced he’d started laying awake in bed and thinking about how he wanted to tell Travis how he felt, like where he would do it and what specific words he would say, and how Travis would tell Nolan he liked him back. 

And now Nolan feels like he did two years ago. No idea where Travis’ head’s at, doubting himself, off balance. 

“I swear I’m gonna be better for you, though,” Travis tells him, his voice earnest and pleading. “I just want us to be back together again, man.” 

Looking at Travis--brown eyes Nolan feels like he’s spent years staring into, snapback that he’s maybe spent even more time looking at, stupid scraggly facial hair on his chin and pretty, silky hair trailing out from under his hat, Nolan thinks,  _ just fuck it.  _ He didn’t start this whole short-shorts quest to get in touch with his sexuality or whatever just so he could keep lying about what and who he likes. 

And he’s also not trying to make this conversation easy for Travis, who does not fucking deserve Nolan making anything easy for him right now.

So he leans back and spreads his thighs further apart and uses his flattest, blankest, most couldn’t-care-less voice and asks, “You mean together as friends, or?”

Travis’ eyes sharpen, intense and wild in this way they get when he's thinking a ton of things at once. 

Travis has told Nolan he loves him a thousand times. Nolan’s said, “you are so much fucking fun” and “I’m gonna move into the cabin with you when I retire, okay?” and a bunch of other feely shit. But this snarky ass question in the middle of the biggest fucking fight they’ve ever had is the closest either of them has ever gotten to actually talking about what’s maybe happening between them. 

Travis stares at Nolan. “No,” he says, “not just as friends.” 


	6. Chapter 6

It’s not like Nolan thought hearing Travis say he wanted to ygbe more than friends would make, like,  _ every single  _ thing in his life better. He knows Travis wanting him isn’t going to cure his migraines or fucking keep him from getting injured ever again, but, still, he figured that once Travis said it, they would get together, and that's what Nolan's been wanting basically for forever. 

But because Nolan’s such a fucking freak, his lungs tighten until he can barely breathe when he hears Travis say ‘not just as friends,’ and his first thought is,  _ what if he’s joking?  _ even though he  _ knows _ Travis isn't.

He’s been trying to fight with Travis, because fighting is easy. Crazy and fast and simple; win or lose; like hockey. Fighting leaves him feeling pissed because he lost or happy because he won, and not just fucked up and embarrased and depressed like actually talking about his feelings does. 

But when he tells Travis, “Well, I don’t fucking want that,” his voice starts hard but ends up sounding like he’s crying, and instead of yelling back at him, Travis just frowns and sinks back into the couch like Nolan pushed him. 

Travis opens and closes his mouth, looking lost for words in a way Nolan has basically never seen him. “What do you mean?” he finally asks, like he isn’t hearing Nolan right.

“I mean,” Nolan starts, and then stops. 

When he was younger, Nolan’d had fantasies about, like, making out with Johnathan Toews and getting his dick sucked by a hot guy on an opposing team he played all the time in juniors, but he’d never even come close to actually kissing anyone, let alone asking someone on a date or having sex with them. He knows for some people--Travis included, because Nolan’s seen him hook up after talking to a girl for like five minutes--it’s not a problem, but for Nolan, the thought of doing any of that with someone who he doesn’t feel like he can totally trust is just fucking  _ terrifying. _

Nolan knows he won’t be a good kisser at first; will need some coaching. And obviously he’s not going to be good at sex: he’s got no idea how he’s supposed to give a blowjob without just totally scraping the other guy’s dick up with his teeth, figures he’ll probably come in thirty seconds the first time someone else touches his cock, has no idea how to, like, actually get someone ready for anal. And he’s also not great boyfriend material--he sucks at talking about his feelings, and he’s a bitch, and he basically doesn’t know how to do anything other than play hockey and hunt and fish. 

Travis is the first person he’s known who he’s into and also felt like he could count on to put up with all that.

But when Travis tells him he doesn’t want to just be friends, looks at him like, “okay, buddy, now it’s your turn,” Nolan can’t think of anything but the fact that Travis abandoned him for  _ four months  _ just because Nolan started getting fucking migraines. 

It would maybe be easier to tell Travis he just doesn’t like him, because then Nolan wouldn’t have to dig any deeper into the annoyingly complicated hole of what he feels for Travis. Instead, he looks at Travis and says, “I don’t mean I don’t  _ want  _ you,  _ obviously,  _ I  _ wanted  _ you, but...”

“But what?” Travis asks earnestly, like this is a problem he can solve. 

Nolan bites his lip. “I don’t trust you now,” he says, his voice quiet and weak and so dumbly honest he blushes. He can’t keep looking at Travis. He turns is face forward, stares at the blank black screen of the TV, and pushes his hair behind his ears, feeling fucking awful and exposed and guilty. Travis just told him something Nolan has been waiting years to hear, looked at Nolan all hopeful and vulnerable, and Nolan  _ rejected  _ him. Travis sucks in a loud, slow breath, and no matter how much Nolan wanted to fight with Travis earlier, hurting him now feels like the wrongest thing in the world. “Teeks, I’m sorry--”

Travis’ hand lands on the back of his neck, warm and callused. When he speaks, his voice is quick and soft. “No, Patty, I get you.” He squeezes Nolan’s neck. “I’ll show you you can trust me again, okay? I’ll do whatever you need.” 

Nolan keeps his eyes closed and blindly leans into Travis’ shoulder, tilts his face into him, and spends a long, ridiculous second just breathing him in before he pulls away and finally meets his eyes. Travis looks at him intently, his face determined.

And Nolan doesn’t trust Travis the way he had before--doesn’t trust him enough to kiss him--but he can trust Travis to do this, because for as long as Nolan’s known him, Travis has always figured out ways to make Nolan’s life better. 

“Okay,” Nolan says, and Travis somehow still smiles like Nolan’s made him happy.

“Okay cool,” Travis says, his voice lighter and more normal. “You want to eat something?”

Nolan heats up one of his prepared meals for himself and an old Hot Pocket for Travis and they eat across from each other, talking about nothing but a funny episode of a show Travis watched the night before, which he recounts to Nolan in so much detail and so hilariously that Nolan really has no reason to go watch it.

Nolan basically feels like he never wants to talk about his emotions again, and it seems like Travis is done with serious shit, too, so he just listens to TK’s voice and eats bland food and feels happier than he has in months. 

***

The next night, Travis lets himself into Nolan’s apartment.

Nolan’s sprawled on his couch with his head on a carefully folded up blanket, one of the fabric covered cold packs Travis bought him slowly melting over his eyes when there’s a knock on his door. Nolan groans and immediately decides there's no way he's getting up to answer it, and then the lock clicks and the knob turns, and Travis’ voice calls, “Hey, it’s me.” 

Nolan slides the cold pack off his eyes and half lifts his head to squint at Travis as he drops two grocery bags in the kitchen and then comes to stand behind the couch.

“Feeling bad today?” he asks, soft and casual. 

“Uh-huh,” Nolan grunts.

“Will it bother you if I cook something? I showed Mickey this recipe and she said it worked with your diet plan,” Travis says, leaning down to prop one elbow on the back of the couch. 

Nolan blinks up at him, his head throbbing. “Whatever,” he says, gesturing to the kitchen and feeling like he’s in an alternate universe. Travis smiles down at him and reaches across Nolan to grab the cold pack. 

“If you smell something burning, just keep this over your eyes and ignore it, okay?” he says, handing the pack to Nolan. 

Nolan rolls his eyes and watches as Travis turns and walks into the kitchen, sets his phone on the counter and starts pulling food out of the grocery bags. Nolan’s brain is fuzzy with pain, and he doesn’t have the energy to worry about Travis using a stove or to feel warm and fuzzy about the fact that Travis found a diet plan approved meal, ran it by Nolan’s care team, bought all the supplies, and is planning on cooking it for Nolan himself. Instead, he drops the sushi printed cold pack back over his eyes, and thinks about the sound of Travis’ key in Nolan’s door. 

He half sleeps as he listens to Travis move around the kitchen, muttering to himself and swearing occasionally. It’s kind of like being at home, napping in the living room of his parents’ house instead of in his old bedroom just so he can hear the noise of his family, can occasionally be half woken up by his mom and his dad talking or his sisters laughing or his family’s dog barking. 

Nolan doesn’t realize he’s fallen all the way asleep until he wakes up to Travis jostling his shoulder and saying, “Patty, I kind of wanted to let you sleep but also I think this shit actually turned out and I know you won’t believe me if you don’t actually taste it.” 

Nolan smiles under the cover of the cold pack, then lets it slide off his face and heaves himself up to sit on the couch, his brain only feeling a little bit like it's swirling around in his skull. Travis is standing between the coffee table and the couch holding two bowls. He hands Nolan one, then drops down on the couch next to him. 

The bowls are filled with a bright yellow soup that smells like turmeric, which Nolan only recognizes because his dieticians have apparently decided that turmeric is, like,  _ the  _ essential migraine spice. 

Nolan stirs it cautiously, seeing some unevenly cut chunks of vegetables and chicken, and then bravely takes a bite. It’s not like Travis has a bad history with cooking, or anything--it’s just that Nolan’s literally never seen him cook.

The soup has the smokey burn of turmeric, the sweetness of coconut milk. The chicken is moist-ish, and the vegetables are soft and nice. “Teeks, it’s good,” he says, grinning over at Travis and finding him staring hopefully back.

“ _ Right _ ?” he says, “That’s what  _ I  _ thought, bro. What the fuck, I’m a fucking chef!” 

They both finish their bowls of soup, and then Travis puts all the dishes in the dishwasher and starts it. He packs up some groceries he has left and sets his bags on the table by Nolan’s front door, and then shifts back and forth on his feet for a minute before turning back to Nolan.

“Do you need to go to sleep right now or what?”

It’s eight thirty. Nolan glares at Travis for the fucking rudeness of suggesting that Nolan might have a pre-nine-o’clock bedtime. 

Travis smiles, and then crosses the room and drops down back on the couch, right up against Nolan’s side. “Okay, so,” he says, his voice light and happy and just  _ classic  _ TK, and Nolan slouches down next to him, spreads out his blanket a little so Travis has a corner of it on his lap, too, and listens to stories about stupid things the guys on the team did in practice that morning.

***

Nolan’s mostly testing Travis when he sends him a snap at ten a.m. on a game day that says “will you come brush my hair for me” over a selfie of himself glaring into his bathroom mirror, the light above him shining off his hair. 

He doesn’t have a migraine, so there’s no actual reason he can’t do it himself. It’s not like it was at Thanksgiving, when Nolan had gone weeks without having a day where he felt good enough to touch his head or concentrate on holding a comb, so his hair isn’t nearly as ratty as it was when his mom brushed it for him--although that would serve Travis right--but it’s not in, like, pristine condition, either. It’s greasy and he’s slept on it for three days without doing anything to it, so there’s probably a big tangle at the back of his head. 

It’s been three weeks since Travis told him he’d earn his trust again. Three weeks of Travis cooking for Nolan, calling Nolan every night when he’s on the road, spending what must be every second of his free time in Nolan’s apartment. Coming in to Nolan’s apartment giving him one look and immediately knowing Nolan has a migraine, then spending hours pulling out random Etsy products, rubbing a stick of CBD cream into Nolan’s temples, putting cold packs over his eyes, shoving a soft, faux fur pillow under his head, giving him iced gatorade with a bendy straw in it, looking at him all concerned and soft and making Nolan feel pampered and pathetic and protected. 

Travis answers Nolan’s snap literally immediately, “Omw,” and he’s in Nolan’s apartment two minutes later.

“In here,” Nolan calls from the bathroom when he hears the front door. 

Nolan leans on the sink and stares at himself in the mirror and listens to Travis’ footsteps move through the apartment. 

“Hey, greaseball,” is how Travis greets him, stepping into the bathroom doorway, his eyes going straight to Nolan’s hair, serious and assessing. Nolan’s eyes go all over Travis. He’s got on a dark green snapback and a hoodie that’s almost exactly the same color, his skin looking warm and dark against them. “We gotta wash it, too, bud,” Travis says.

“Fuck no,” Nolan bitches, but Travis looks cozy and hot and Nolan wants Travis’ hands in his hair so much he feels sick with it, so, whatever, fine. 

Travis ignores Nolan’s no anyway. He yanks Nolan’s shower curtain noisily open, the metal rings screeching across the curtain rod. “Oops,” he says, and then grabs Nolan’s arms and pushes him to sit on the edge of the bathtub. “Take your shirt off.” 

Nolan’s wearing his shortest pair of black shorts and he has literally nothing against showing a little more skin in front of Travis, because being almost naked in front of him not in a locker room but alone in Nolan’s bathroom is like, fantasy material, and also because Travis hasn’t checked him out yet, has barely looked at anything other than Nolan’s hair, and that’s pretty fucking offensive. Nolan pulls his t-shirt off by the neck and drops it on the floor at his feet.

Travis glances sideways at him for just, like, half a second, then props one knee on the edge of the bathtub to balance himself as he ducks into the shower and turns the water on and holds a hand under it. He pulls the showerhead down. 

“Tip your head back,” he says, and his voice seems like it’s fucking lower than Nolan’s ever heard it, and it makes every inch of Nolan’s mostly exposed skin feel hot and tingly. Nolan lets his head drop backwards and closes his eyes, listening to the thrum of the water; of his pulse.

Travis’ hand comes before the water, just sliding along Nolan’s hairline, pressing sideways against his forehead to shield his eyes. Travis must have changed the setting on the shower head so it’s spraying out thick, heavy jets of water, and he holds it so close to Nolan’s head that they feel like they’re massaging him, moving against his scalp like hot fingers. He lets himself lean further back, propping his hands at his sides and arching his back and his neck a little so his hair doesn’t drip on the floor or something. 

Nolan hates going to get his hair cut because he fucking  _ hates  _ making small talk with the person cutting it. The only part he’s ever liked is the way the haircutters' fingernails feel scratching shampoo into his scalp as Nolan props his neck against a hard ridge of plastic. 

Travis doesn’t have long fingernails like most of the people who have cut Nolan’s hair have, but when he gets shampoo in his hand and sinks his fingers down to Nolan’s scalp, it feels so good Nolan leans up into Travis’ fingertips moving all over on his head, scrunching his hair and scratching his skin and massaging the back of his neck, and then Nolan fucking  _ groans.  _

“Patty,” Travis says, his voice even lower than before. He clears his throat, and his voice is just barely more normal when he says, “See, washing your hair is  _ good  _ for you.” 

Nolan’s so relaxed and loose that he laughs at that. 

Travis spends more long minutes massaging shampoo and then conditioner into Nolan’s hair, then rinsing it and wringing it dry. “Where’s your brush?” he asks, in that same low voice, putting a hand on the top of Nolan’s spine and urging him to sit up. 

Nolan opens his eyes and blinks at the light. Travis is standing over him, looking intently down at him, his hand still on the bare, damp skin of Nolan’s back.

Nolan has spent hours and hours of his life getting off while thinking about Travis. About what their first time together will be like, about Travis coaching Nolan as he sucks Travis’ dick, about Travis dropping to his knees and giving Nolan his first blow job. He’s layed in bed and practiced sucking on his fingers, thought about times he could fuck Travis--after a win, when Travis is sweaty; in the morning on the road, when Travis is just waking up and has to be quiet so the guys in the hotel room next to theirs don’t hear. 

But he’s never really thought about their first kiss, because it just seems like something that has to happen in the moment, something he has no idea how to even pretend to plan for.

Maybe it’s just because Travis is so close, because Nolan’s almost naked, because the air is thick with steam, but Nolan can’t stop staring at Travis’ lips. 

Nolan knows Travis isn’t going to kiss him. He told Travis less than a week ago that he wasn’t ready for him, and no matter how much he wants Travis, that’s still fucking true. 

Travis rubs at his back for a second, and then turns away and opens the drawers below the bathroom sink, rustling around before triumphantly pulling out a comb. 

Actually getting his hair brushed by Travis kind of sucks. Nolan has a sensitive scalp, and even though Travis has hair the same length as Nolan’s he somehow apparently has no idea how to be gentle as he combs through tangles.

“You suck at this,” Nolan tells him the third time Travis pulls the comb through a knot so roughly it makes Nolan want to whine. 

“Just wait until I’m done and you look like Brad Pit,” Travis tells him, bracing a hand on the top of Nolan’s head and yanking the comb through another chunk of hair.

“Brad Pit looks gross now, make me look like someone else.” 

“You’re right, you’re way prettier. I’ll just leave you as you,” Travis says casually, and Nolan doesn’t care if he’s joking, Travis calling him  _ pretty  _ fucking gets him.

“Thanks,” Nolan says, and he means for complimenting him and washing his hair and being here and for everything fucking else, because it hits him suddenly so hard that his eyes start to water that Travis has waited a stupid long time for Nolan when he has absoultely no reason to, when he could have so many other, easier people, and that now he’s acting like being forced to wait longer is nothing, like just getting to be around Nolan is the best thing in the world.

“Of course, dude” Travis says, so genuine that Nolan has to bite his lip and stay quiet for the rest of the time Travis is combing his hair to try and keep himself from being weird, just randomly saying I love you or some shit. 

When Travis decides Nolan’s hair tangle free and sets the comb down on the counter, Nolan swallows the part of himself that hates asking shit like this and says, “You wanna take your nap here?” 

Travis has to be at the stadium in two hours, and he usually naps for one. Nolan knows the Flyers’ schedule, knows hockey time, even though all he’s done for months is work out at home and read results and half watch one game in Winnipeg. Travis probably has to pack his bag, pick out his suit, have lunch. 

“Yes,” he says immediately. 

Nolan glances at his shirt, which is damp on the floor next to his feet, and then ignores it and stands up, feeling weirdly surprised at finally being taller than Travis again, and leads Travis into the bedroom. 

“You mind if I take these off?” Travis asks, gesturing toward his jeans. Nolan shakes his head maybe too quickly. 

He crawls into his bed and turns onto his side, facing away from Travis to hide his blush. He and Travis have napped in the same bed together probably a hundred times, on the road or at their apartments, even at Kevin or Jake’s places a few times. They’ve spent whole nights in the same bed, stripped down to their underwear, cuddled underneath the blankets in the winter or shoved away from each other and with nothing but a sheet over them in the summer, out at Travis’ cabin with no air conditioning and with a spare bedroom Nolan hadn’t even pretended to use. 

The bed shifts under Travis’ weight, the comforter pulling up and a swish of cool air coming in, and then Travis is right up against Nolan’s back, prodding at his ribs. “Turn around and spoon me, weirdo,” Travis demands, and then the bed shifts again as he rolls over. Nolan rolls over, too, and they both scoot closer to each other at the same time, Travis’ ass settling against Nolan’s hips where his dick is thankfully mostly soft, because Nolan has good self control, Travis’ bare legs folding themselves over Nolan’s, their knees curling together. 

Nolan wraps an arm around Travis and pushes his hand into the pocket at the front of Travis’ hoodie, flattening his palm against his stomach. Travis breathes out and leans back into Nolan’s chest. He’s quiet for a few minutes, and Nolan breathes him in and practically fucking shakes with how good it is to be touching him again and waits for him to start talking.

Travis’ hour long naps usually involve twenty minutes of talking, fifteen minutes of rolling around and adjusting his pillows and switching blankets, exactly nineteen minutes of sleep, and six minutes of lying in bed complaining about not getting enough sleep. 

“I missed you so much,” is what Travis eventually says, even though they've been hanging out basically every day for weeks, and Nolan buries his face in Travis’ hair, already messed up from the hat he’d been wearing. “I promise I’ll never do that to you again.” 

Nolan squeezes his eyes shut. “Okay,” he says, and he mostly believes Travis. 

Travis doesn’t say anything else, but he clearly isn’t trying to sleep either. He’s just still and awake against Nolan’s chest.

Nolan doesn’t need to nap, because he’s not playing a game tonight and he slept for twelve hours last night after taking one of his strongest pain pills. He feels weird, half relaxed like he did in the shower, half wired on the feeling of Travis. He wants to hear Travis talk.

“Did you know I’ve never kissed anyone before,” he says quietly. 

Travis shifts in his arms and Nolan has a moment of thinking,  _ That was too weird,  _ but Travis just slips his arm into his own sweatshirt pocket alongside Nolan’s and sinks his fingers into the gaps between Nolan’s knuckles. 

“Yeah? I kind of thought.” 

Nolan swallows. “Do you know how many girls you’ve kissed?” 

Travis makes a thoughtful noise, and Nolan hugs him closer. “Maybe thirty.” He pauses. “Maybe ten guys.” Nolan gulps, his stomach tense and his lungs tense and his thighs so tense they’re shaking, and Travis pauses again and then says, “I haven’t been with anyone else since lMarch.”

Nolan clutches at Travis’ fingers.  _ Nine months,  _ he thinks.  _ He hasn’t been with anyone since-- _

“After that one girl in Boston?” he asks, feeling unsteady and at the same time fucking steadier than he has in forever. It isn’t like he didn't know Travis hadn't dated anyone in a while, that he'd stopped hooking up as much, at least when he went out with the team or with Nolan. He'd been pretty sure-ish in the summer that Travis was kind of waiting for him. He’d tried not to think about it over the past four months, had hoped and then felt stupid for hoping that Travis wasn’t picking up all the time while Nolan was sitting at home, two floors down from where Travis was probably having sex with other people. 

“Yeah,” Travis says, and Nolan feels the rumble of his voice through his back. “I shouldn’t have done it then, either.” 

Boston last season had been a fucking shit show. They’d lost, and Travis had played bad and been pissed off after. The whole team had gone out and gotten drunk, and Nolan had sat quietly at a high top table and watched Travis go up to a short, dark haired girl at the bar, smile at her, and then leave with her.

All the guys on the team saw it, and Nolan tried not to feel embarrassed, because it’s not like he and Travis were fucking anything at all, but Claude and Sean were weirdly quiet next to him, and instead of saying something about how hot the chick Travis picked up was or whatever, Jake just said, “What’s up with TK?”

Nolan had known he didn’t have a reason to be jealous, but he’d been a huge fucking dick when Travis had gotten back to their hotel late that night, drunker than he’d been when he left the bar, stumbling and sloppy and loud.

“Can you sleep somewhere else if you can’t shut up?” Nolan had said in literally his rudest voice, and Travis had jumped and looked at Nolan all weird and sad, taken a long breath, and then said,

“Can I sleep with you?”

They’d already shared a bed before, at that point, and if Nolan didn’t know Travis had just fucked someone else, he would have said yes right away and barely felt weird about it. 

“Fuck  _ no  _ ,” he snapped, turning away from Travis and tucking his head under the thick hotel comforter. 

Travis mumbled, “Oh, sorry.  _ Shit, _ ” stumbled around a little more, and then the door shut quietly behind him as he left the room.

The next morning, he’d let himself back in and handed Nolan, who was fresh out of the shower and half dressed, a blended caramel latte. “Morning,” he said, his voice careful.

“Morning,” Nolan said back flatly, talking the latte. “Thanks.” Travis half smiled at him, and then sat down on his unused bed and waited in silence for Nolan to get ready to get on the bus.

“You don’t have to not hook up,” Nolan says now, feeling guilty for being a jerk a year and a half ago and for being a prude since then. 

Travis scoffs. “Don’t be stupid,” he says. 

Nolan nuzzles his nose deeper into Travis’ hair, feeling hopeful and proud and happy. He sucks in a deep breath, and realizes that the smell of Travis’ hair is  _ familiar,  _ but it’s not the smell of the shampoo Travis always used to use, spicy and sweet, a smell Nolan knows like he knows every other part of Travis, knows from digging his face into Travis’ hair when they’re laying like this or hugging at Nolan’s front door after hanging out or when Nolan has to borrow Travis’ soap on the road. “You smell different,” he says, breathing in again, trying to figure out why the smell is so familiar but so not Travis. 

“Shit, sorry,” Travis says, yanking his hand out of Nolan’s and rolling away.

“What?” Nolan says, blinking at Travis as he slides across the bed, gets as far away from Nolan as he can. 

“I’m really sorry, buddy, I was using this unscented stuff but I ran out and all I had was this tea tree one, but then I saw this lady online saying that tea tree always triggers her migraines, and I ordered a new unscented one yesterday but I didn’t think it would be a big deal because we haven’t been getting that close. But fuck, I should have told you before we got in bed, I'm sorry I wasn’t thinking."

“Teeks,” Nolan says, his voice weak. It’s not like he needed a reminder, because it’s obvious all the time and always in his head, but, fuck, he loves Travis. "Fuck you," he says, grabbing for the pocket of Travis’ sweatshirt and pulling.

Travis rolls his eyes and stays as far away from Nolan as he can get without leaving the bed.

“You're stupid, don't do all that shit for me. And, like, smell and sound don’t really do anything, it’s just light and what I eat."

“Are you sure?” Travis asks, and fuck that, like Travis knows more about migraines than fucking Nolan does.

“Yes I’m fucking sure,” he growls, pulling harder on Travis' sweatshirt. “You smell fine, come here.” Travis resists for one second, then smiles and smoothly rolls himself back into Nolan’s body, grabbing Nolan’s hand in his and tucking both of their arms back inside the pocket of his hoodie. 

An hour later, Nolan pushes Travis, who never slept but whined about getting out of bed for even longer than normal, out the door and calls Nico. He feels like a fucking WAG, staying behind at home with nothing to do but talk on the phone as Travis goes off to play hockey. 

Nolan’s been talking to Nico about Travis, like, practically fucking daily. Telling him about every thing Travis does that make Nolan’s whole body clench up in this sweet, achy way, and then the things that Nolan worries about when Travis isn’t there. 

“So, um” Nico says once Nolan tells him about the soap thing, “what more is he supposed to do before you’re ready to do it with him?” 

“Nothing, I don't know,” Nolan says. Travis has been nothing but perfect and sweet and  _ there  _ for three weeks.

"Come on, he changed his  _ shampoo  _ for you. You can't still think he's going to get sick of you." 

But Nolan kind of does.

Nolan likes everything about Travis. Like, literally, there’s not anything he would change about him. Not his redneck facial hair, not how much he loves annoying Nolan, not how he can get so passionate about something for a few weeks and then move on from it out of nowhere. 

Nolan can tell that Travis is having an okay time taking care of Nolan now, but it’s new and still kind of fun, in the way that Travis finds every mundane thing he does kind of fun for a while. But Nolan’s been living with himself for months, dealing with how boring he is, how inconsistent his head and his moods are, and he’s so fucking sick of himself at this point he’s got no idea how anyone can stand him.

It’s not like Travis doesn’t ever commit to things. Obviously he  _ can _ , because he’s a fucking professional hockey player. He’s fished for his whole life, which takes patience. And up until this season he went years without ever seeming to get sick of Nolan. Nolan figures that if he’s his regular self, healthy, or at least healthy-ish, and not so fucking high maintenance all the time, then Travis can put up with him and not get burnt out on it. 

And Nolan just wants to do everything he can to make sure Travis doesn't get tired of him, because once they get together, Nolan doesn't know how he can ever go back to  _ not  _ being with Travis. 

"You're seriously not going to do anything with him until you get better?" Nico asks judgily after Nolan doesn't say anything for a minute.

Nolan says, “No.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this fluffy / angsty chapter! I loved writing it. 
> 
> We're un-quarantine-ing where I am, so I'm going back to work and won't have as much time to write. My updates might not be as frequent, but I’m going to try to post at least once a week. (Keeping this note in here for my personal history--laughing at myself saying "un-quarantine-ing").
> 
> Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you liked this chapter!


	7. Chapter 7

Travis still has to pack his bag and eat something and drive through traffic to the stadium. He’s going to be late to pregame and get a huge ass fine and a fucking reaming from his coach and a shit ton of chirping from his teammates, but he does  _ not  _ fucking care, he  _ has  _ to get himself off after that afternoon with Patty.

_ Patty _ , eyes closed and back arched below Travis, shirtless and in those teeny fucking shorts, his shoulders and his thighs and his waist and all his pale fucking skin just making Travis want to crawl on his lap and lick him. And then Patty in bed, Travis’ ass right against his crotch where he can always feel Pat’s huge ass dick even if he’s not half fucking hard, which he  _ was,  _ and it took every bit of Travis’ self control not to grind back on him and make him come, to roll over and give him his first kiss. 

Travis jerks off over the bathroom sink for quick clean up, because he’s at least a little bit responsible. He’s fucking squirming at the thought of his dildo after the tease of Patty’s cock got him all worked the fuck up, but he’s not trying to miss the whole fucking game so he settles for just leaning forward and spreading his thighs and imagining Patty walking in on him like that, already prepped so Pat can just grab his hip and sink inside him, fuck Travis right there, come inside him while Travis comes on the bathroom counter. 

Travis manages to get off and clean up in less than ten minutes, and he thanks Pat mentally for making it quick by being so fucking hot.

When he walks into the locker room he’s  _ barely  _ ten minutes late, but he still gets a dirty,  _ I’ll deal with you later  _ look from AV, Kevin yelling from across the room, “Oh  _ shit  _ Teeks, I thought you got scratched,” G growling, “Get fucking dressed already,” as he walks by, and Jake waiting until Travis is shoving his stuff into his stall to say, his voice casual and mild, “How’s Nolan today?”

“Great, bud,” Travis says cheerily. “He said to tell you to shave that fucking beard off.” Jake rolls his eyes and turns back to his own stall.

Travis puts on his gear, tapes his pads and his stick, and skates onto the ice for warm ups.

The stands are only half full, people still filtering in and finding their seats, but the stadium is already loud, and Travis skates around for a minute and just soaks in the noise, lets it get him psyched and pull him out of his head, which is all full of how much he wishes Pat was playing tonight. (Which is so stupid--he played ninety percent of the hockey in his life before he even knew Patty, so playing without him shouldn’t be a big deal.)

It's an easy win. Travis scores and talks so much shit that one of the Rangers defenders gets in his face and yells at him, “Just shut up, for fucks sake, stop fucking talking,” so he leaves the stadium feeling pretty fucking good. 

***

Two nights later, Travis is getting ready to head down to Nolan’s for what he’s pretty sure might be a date when Joel sends him a picture of his laundry basket with just the words, “omw over.”

“No,” Travis sends back right away. And then, when Joel doesn’t answer, “I’m about to go to Pat’s.” 

Twenty minutes later, Joel opens Travis’ door without knocking, yelling a hello and hauling an overflowing laundry basket with him. “Hey man, no worries,” he says, when Travis steps out of his bedroom and gives him a frazzled look. “I’m sure Nolan will be cool if I crash your date.”

Joel shoves his clothes into Travis' in-unit washer, which he acted like was the fucking holy grail the first time he saw it, all “I’m never going to the laundromat again,” and Travis is like pretty sure he actually hasn’t, because it seems like he’s barging into Travis’ apartment every week demanding he take the clothes he’s been letting sit in his dryer out so he can use it. 

Travis pulls at his hair, feeling stressed in a way he, like, is really not used to. "Fuck your stupid cheap ass apartment.  _ Fuck _ ." Joel smiles at him, and Travis clenches his teeth and goes back into his bedroom to choose his not-actually-a-date-but-kind-of-a-date outfit.

Pat had asked Travis to come over for a movie night yesterday, both of them leaning against the wall just inside Pat’s doorway, Travis not wanting to leave and Pat looking like he didn’t want him to go and Travis’ mind just running all over the place: Pat saying he didn’t trust Travis, Pat saying he’d never been kissed; Pat wanting boundaries, Pat looking at him all sweet and soft and blushy, his lips dark and wet, that little gap between his teeth when he smiled making Travis want to stick his tongue in it. “Want to come over tomorrow night and watch a movie?” Pat’d asked, his voice low and intimate in the inch of space between them.

Pat was subtle, but Travis had two years of experience telling the difference between his happy glares and his pissed off ones (all in the eyebrows), and it was pretty clear in the way Patty looked at him just a little closer; a second longer that he was asking Travis to do more than just hang out, Travis was almost sure. 

He’s been excited to go on a maybe date with Pat all fucking day, but Joel’s here now, and he’s relentless, so Travis gives up on his fantasy of making out with Pat while they pretended to watch a movie and facetimes him. “Hey," he starts as soon as Pat answers, his phone like, sitting on his thigh or something so Travis can see the bottom of his chin and nose, a long stretch of his t-shirt and his hands holding an Xbox controller against his stomach. He's looking, like, amazing, hair messy and pushed back from his face, just so fucking hot. "Dude I'm sorry but Beezer randomly came over to do laundry or whatever even though I fucking  _ told _ him we're hanging out, and he won't leave, so, like, is it okay if he comes tonight?”

Pat blinks down at him, drops the controller off to his side and runs a hand through his hair. Shrugs. "Whatever," he says, sounding unbothered. 

"Okay," Travis bites his lip. "We'll be down in a sec."

"Kay," Pat says, and hangs up. 

Travis still wants Pat to know that he knows that it’s a date and not just bros, so he looks for something nice to wear. He chooses a dark yellow hoodie he’s worn to a couple media things, a tight-ish pair of jeans, and a plain black snapback. 

When he goes back into the living room Joel gives him a once over and two raised eyebrows and says, “Oh, so I didn’t know it was  _ actually  _ a  _ date _ ,” and Travis has been thinking about it all afternoon so even though he knows he’s going to get so much shit he says,

“I was trying to decide if I should kiss Pats tonight.”

Travis had kind of underestimated how awesome it would feel to be around Patty without even a hint of subtlety between them; to have Pat know that Travis liked guys and liked him. Like, he’d never been super subtle before, but he also had never massaged Pat’s scalp like he was making fucking love to him or, like, held hands with Pat while they watched TV--or, if Patty was having a migraine, listened to a podcast-- which was something they’d started doing a couple days ago. 

Travis would have come out to Pat fucking  _ forever  _ ago, except at some point he realized that telling Patty he was into guys was basically the same as telling Patty he was into him, because what other fucking guy was there supposed to be for him? And Pat was shy and reserved and skittish--Travis was pretty sure Patty came from the type of house where his parents had never kissed in front of him or something--and Travis had figured two years ago that saying something like, “Hey, want to fuck me?” would have freaked the fuck out of him. 

That kind of thing definitely  _ does not  _ freak out Joel, who’ll tell fucking  _ anyone  _ about all the guys from the Phantoms he hooked up with and who’s sent Travis dick pics he “wants an extra set of eyes on” and shit. 

“You want to kiss him?” Joel asks.

“Fucking  _ obviously.  _ I just don’t know if he wants it yet.”

Joel rubs his chin, squinting and nodding and humming like that’s going to convince Travis he’s having a thought. “Okay, bro, I’ll scope it out tonight and let you know.”

Pat looks so good when they get down to his apartment--tall and smiley and definitely date-y, dressed in a slim fitting black tee and tight black jeans--that Travis wants to 1. shut the door on Joel so he can be alone with him and 2. stick himself under Pat’s arm and show him off to Joel, all,  _ check out my hot ass future boyfriend.  _

Pat says hi to Travis and Joel and leads them into the kitchen, where he’s got a box of pizza sitting on the counter, warm like he ordered it so it would be here right on time, covered in extra-extra pepperoni like Travis likes. Travis feels guilty as he takes his first bite, even though he knows Pat doesn't even like pizza, but Pat seems totally content to eat his preservative-free chicken and rice as Travis and Joel hog out.

Travis asks Patty something about hunting, and they start talking about deer season, which is coming up after Christmas, and Joel says, “Hunting is actually the worst hobby, let’s talk about anything else,” so they end up talking about the Flyers’ upcoming games. It’s--it’s crazy. Travis has missed so many fucking things about Patty that he didn’t even realize how badly he missed just talking about games with him like this, hearing Nolan get bitchy about other players he doesn’t like, listening to him talk about the game, smart in this way that’s, like, actually so hot. 

Patty starts the movie after dinner and goes to the bathroom while the opening credits start, leaving Joel and Travis standing in the living room staring each other down. 

“This couch looks comfy,” Joel says, flopping down on one end of it and smiling sweetly up at Travis.

“Get up,” Travis hisses. “You get the chair.” 

“Nolan’s nice; I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing the couch with me.”

“He’s not  _ nice _ ,” Travis says, “and he’s sharing with me, get  _ up. _ ”

By the time Patty comes back, Joel is sitting obediently in the armchair giving Travis totally unsubtle raised eyebrow looks and Travis is in almost the exact middle of the couch. He’s not sure how comfortable Patty is in front of Joel; whether he wants to pretend he and Travis are just friends or whether he just doesn’t like PDA or whether he doesn't even want to be out or what, but Travis wants to make it clear that he’s down to snuggle if Pat is, so when Patty saunters over to the couch, Travis lifts up the edge of his blanket and smiles up at Patty. Pat glances at Joel for half a second and then gives Travis a quiet, serious look before sitting down right next to him, curling his knees up and tilting them into Travis’ lap.

Travis sighs and leans into the sturdy muscle of Pat's side, and lets his mind just quiet down as he watches the movie.

Usually Travis gets antsy after sitting still for more than an hour, but the movie is good, and he’s happy to stay cuddled against Pat and get sucked into the action on screen, to gradually slump closer and closer to Pat, get more and more tangled up with him as Pat slouches down and leans his head on the side of Travis' chest, puts his arm around Travis' waist and shrugs Travis' arm across his shoulders. Travis strokes at the sleeve of his t-shirt, plays with the ends of his hair. Glances at Joel a couple times and gestures down toward Pat with his chin like,  _ "look at my fucking game, can you believe this?" _ making Joel roll his eyes and snort. 

When it's over, Pat rocks into Travis' side once, then gets up and stretches. “I think it’s past your bedtime,” Joel tells him sternly, and Pat rolls his eyes but walks them both to the door. 

Travis takes one long look at Pat and one long breath of his familiar, essential-oil scented apartment, lit only with a couple warm, soft lamps.

“Night Patty,” he says, his voice soft.

“Night Teeks,” Pat says back, giving him a long-ish but not long enough look, before turning and smiling all friendly at Joel. “Night Joel, good to see you.”

“Same, buddy,” Joel says, giving Nolan a quick hug. 

Back in his apartment, Travis helps Joel fold his clothes into his laundry basket, which is ridiculous because he doesn’t even fold his own clothes. Joel waits until Travis has snottily draped his lost pair of boxers onto the pile before crossing his arms and giving Travis a serious look. “Are you still freaked out about the whole being hyper, you know, giving him a migraine thing?”

Travis scrunches his nose up. He doesn’t even remember talking to Joel about that, but, like. He’s definitely been drunk around Joel over the last few months, and it’s definitely been pretty much the only thing he’s thought about, so it makes sense. “I wouldn’t say ‘freaked out,’ but. I mean, no, I don’t want to trigger a migraine for him.” 

For the most part, Travis thinks he’s pretty good at taking care of Patty when he’s feeling bad, giving him the things he needs and then just chilling with him, lying on his super cushy pillows and cuddling up with him, just talking, no distractions because Pat’s supposed to keep his screen time down.

Actually, he kind of loves taking care of him. Hates that Patty has to be taken care of at all, but he likes being there for him, helping him out and making him happy. And he doesn’t mind doing whatever Patty needs to help him trust Travis again, either. If Pat wants him to run circles, that’s okay with Travis.

“Were you, like, trying to be quiet tonight?” Joel asks.

“No, dude, I was just chilling.” 

“So when you say that you’re always too loud around him, what does that mean? Because you were fucking quieter than I’ve ever seen you, bro.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but. Like, sometimes I just want to tell him literally every single thing that goes through my head.”

“Maybe he wants to hear it.” Travis gives Joel a  _ you’re so stupid  _ look he learned from Patty. “Come on, you deserve someone who wants to hear all your dumbass thoughts, Tiki,” Joel says, his voice so honest that Travis stops himself from making fun of him for being sappy and just gets honest, too.

“I know, man, I just--”

“Look, dude, just actually think about whether you’re actually loud around him or whether we all just always talk shit about you being loud and you believe it.”

And that’s--not something Travis has even thought about thinking about before.

Travis has heard the whole thing about him and Patty from the media and on Twitter and from the guys on the team giving them shit: Travis is loud and immature and dumb, and Patty is impatient and quiet and serious.

But really, when it's the two of them together, Travis will sit in silence for hours, nothing but the sounds of a video game around them. And when Travis asks, “Do you think the Obamas ever hooked up in the Oval Office?” Pat will smile and think for a second and then say, “All the time, I bet,” always there with Travis wherever his weird ass mind goes. Or Travis can mute an episode of  _ Our Planet  _ and make his own commentary while Pat just grunts and huffs barely there laughs and glares at the screen, and then when the Netflix “are you still watching” thing comes up, Pat will tilt his head and shift his jaw forward, Travis will click no, and Pat will just  _ talk.  _ Tell crazy stories about him and his friends back home that have Travis cracking up and feeling like he knows every one of Patty's Winnipeg bros, tell quiet little jokes that make Travis snort and then, instead of stopping and trying to look stoic, will get even goofier, try to make Travis laugh even harder. 

“Okay, well, whatever,” Travis says, because fuck, like, figuring out his own emotions right now. “Do you think he wanted me to kiss him or not, though?”

“Oh  _ shit  _ yeah,” Joel says, loud and excited, grinning at Travis and reaching over to slap his cheek twice. “He was licking his lips all night and looking at you like he’d never seen a mouth before, man.”

Travis smiles, and then just laughs, happy and dumb and so fucking excited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I really struggled with this chapter! It's so short and like nothing happens, but it's probably the one I spent the most time on so far. 😂🤷 I really hated it for a while, but I'm actually happy with it now because I love seeing inside Travis' little dog brain. I hope you liked it okay, too (and if you didn't please don't tell me lol, trust me, I know what's wrong with it and I'm feeling rough enough about my writing this week already). I'm really excited about the next chapter, though, which is action packed and angsty! 💃
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, commenting, and leaving kudos! Seeing positive feedback from you guys seriously makes my day. 🥰


	8. Chapter 8

Nolan knows he’s going to have a migraine before he’s even fully awake. He comes half out of a dream about getting slammed headfirst into the boards to a shaky little vibe of tension moving across his face, one cheekbone to the other. As he wakes all the way up and slowly pulls his eyes open against the dark of his blackout curtains, a jolt of sensitivity shoots from the roots of his teeth to the hinge of his jaw to the inside of his skull, right behind his temples, and then stays there. 

In the summer, before he knew what all this shit was about, he would have swapped out his pillow for a softer one, taken an ibuprofen, and tried and failed to go back to sleep.

But if he just stayed in bed every time his head hurt now, he would basically do nothing else. And yeah, when he has really bad migraines, all he really wants to do is zone out until his body figures itself out. But also Nolan just wants to _live_ , and to not be _constantly_ hurting and getting hurt. 

Plus he’s got way better shit than Advil now. 

So he takes one long breath to steady himself, anticipating the way his blood is going to woosh in his head the second he stands up, his brain sloshing around between his ears like water in a bottle, and then he rolls out of bed. 

He takes a mid-strength migraine pill, which probably won’t actually help with the pain that much but won’t knock him out all day either. 

Normally he doesn’t mind getting knocked out, but today he’s leaving town to go up to a cabin deep in Pennsylvania to hang out with Nico over Nico's by-week, which starts before Christmas and ends on New Years Day. 

Nolan’s mom wanted him to come home for Christmas, of course, and offered to fly down to Philly when Nolan said he didn’t want to get on a plane again. Nolan loves his mom and dad and sisters and his family’s dog, but he spent almost all of November with them already, and the cabin Nico found on AirBnb is only a three hour drive away and doesn’t require Nolan’s parents to spend the holidays in Nolan’s messy little apartment or Nolan to deal with his parents’ worrying about him right in his face; his dad guiltily turning the TV off when Nolan goes in a room, the sound of pucks and ice and cheering already in his head anyway.

Nico pitched the idea to him at the beginning of the month. “There’s this sweet little town in PA me and some of my friends went to once,” he said over the phone. “It’s small but it’s so cool, and I found this really sweet AirBnb you and me can stay in and just chill.” 

Nolan wasn’t really convinced until he looked at the AirBnb listing: a clean little log cabin surrounded by fir trees and snow, with a pond out back. 

Nolan knows how chronic migraines work, ish--he knows that it’s all probably genetics and chemicals and not actually caffeine or alcohol or one of the many foods that Nolan’s not supposed to eat. That controlling what he can _might_ help make remission come on faster, but also might not.

Remission, his doctors have told him a hundred times, is actually fucking random. There’s really no way to know what triggers it--maybe finally getting whatever is poisoning you out of your system, but maybe not. Maybe reducing stress and hunger and tiredness and anything else that might trigger migraines. Maybe just waiting, or maybe nothing.

Hearing his doctors talk to him about migraines is boring, and reading about them is fucking depressing. Nolan knows more about this shit than he ever wanted to, but the thing that really sticks with him is a post he read on some forum from a guy who’d been dealing with chronic migraines for years without a hint of remission, who wrote, “I’ve had migraines that lasted 400 days.” 

But that’s not something Nolan can let himself think about too long--he knows without his doctors or his psych telling him, knows from the experience of having injury after injury, surgery after surgery that only made him feel worse, that he has to think about getting better, and nothing else. Because if he doesn’t get better, what is there for him?

Anyway, Nolan knows that it’s all about science and patience and shit, but when he’s in the middle of a migraine, he gets stupid ideas about what will make him better: dunking his head in ice water, breathing in cleaner air and not the smog of Philly, floating in the Dead Sea, smelling cedar and slimy lake water, which is the smell that almost every one of his best memories outside of hockey is set inside of. 

So it’s stupid, but he saw the picture of the little log cabin surrounded by white snow and clear skies and all he could think was that it looked like the opposite of how a migraine feels, or something. 

Plus, whatever, Nico’s one of his best friends and they haven’t hung out in forever.

Nolan finishes his breakfast and texts Nico to ask when he’ll get into Philly. “Soon bro, don’t make me text and drive,” he sends back. Then, “You better be packed.” 

Nolan is. His bag is full mostly of hoodies and sweats, but he’s bringing one pair of skinny jeans and one tight, hipster-y Mt. Joy tee, just in case he actually loses his mind out there and somehow gets convinced to go to what Nico called “the best gay club in rural Pennsylvania.” 

Nolan’s phone vibrates with another text, and he’s ready to tell Nico to stop terrorizing the streets of Philly with his shitty distracted driving, but it’s a message from Travis. 

Travis texts him every morning and literally never actually says “good morning,” but instead just tells Nolan whatever weird thing he woke up thinking about. Today: “I had a dream that I rode an elk.” 

Nolan smiles at his phone screen. “Freaky. Want to come get your present before you leave?”

“Omw,” Travis responds right away.

He shows up to Nolan’s door looking like he actually just rolled out of bed--no hat, hair all matted and grimy, black basketball shorts and a ratty grey tee that’s all stretched out at the neck, eyes unfocused and sleepy. Nolan wants to pull him inside and bring him back to bed. 

“Good morning,” he mumbles.

“Morning,” Travis says, his eyes kind of, like, sticking on Nolan, running over his jaw or something, just staring up at him for a minute instead of barging the rest of the way into the apartment like he normally does. 

“What,” Nolan says.

“Nothing. You look good,” Travis says easily.

Nolan knows he’s not looking that great--he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie and his coat, like any other day. He’s got a black toque on over his hair, which only has two days of grease in it, so, like, okay, Travis has seen him looking _worse,_ but still: he’ll take compliments from Travis any fucking day of the week.

Nolan flushes and turns and stalks into the living room, where Travis’ present is sitting on the couch. Travis follows, wrapped present in his hands that Nolan hadn’t even noticed. They’re both fidgety and weird, Nolan trying to look flat and unaffected, Travis’ eyes twitching all over the apartment, occasionally stopping on Nolan where he’s leaning on the arm of the couch, giving him these long up and down looks that have Nolan feeling hot, have him spreading his thighs a little wider because when Travis looks at him he just wants to fucking show off. 

Nolan knows Travis has to get ready to head to the airport for the Flyers’ last road game before Christmas, which Travis's spending back home with his family. And Nolan should be used to saying bye to Travis after months of staying in his apartment while Travis flies down to Denver, over to LA, up to Toronto, but he still just fucking doesn’t want Travis to leave. 

Travis finally snaps out of it, clicking his eyes up to meet Nolan’s. “You have to promise not to open it until we’re talking together on Christmas,” he says, handing Nolan a slim box wrapped in dark green paper with deer and pinecones printed on it in white. 

Nolan’s not great at buying gifts, and he’s sure whatever Travis got him is going to be, like, perfect and thoughtful and nice and will make his gift to Travis look stupid, but whatever, he tried. He got Travis an actual present, at least, instead of just a bunch of gift cards, which is what he sent his family. 

“You’re to one who always wants to open your shit early, not me,” Nolan says, taking Travis’ gift, handing over his one for Travis, neatly wrapped in plain red paper. Travis rolls his eyes and then immediately shakes the box roughly, holding it up to his ear. “Fuck, be careful,” Nolan says, reaching over and wrapping his fingers around Travis’ wrist to steady him.

Travis freezes, his pulse thumping under Nolan’s middle finger, his skin warm and silky. He looks up at Nolan, looks away. He pulls out of Nolan’s grip, leaning sideways to set the gift box Nolan gave him softly on the coffee table

Then he steps into Nolan, his knees between Nolan’s knees, his hips almost touching Nolan’s.

It’s closer than they’ve been in a long time. Nolan doesn’t think about it, and if he would have, no way he would’ve done it, but he reaches out on instinct, and puts a hand on Travis’ side. 

Travis’ breath shakes, loud enough that Nolan can hear it, and he reaches up to curve his palms around Nolan’s jaw, staring up at Nolan focused and intent. 

It’s a touch that Nolan thinks shouldn’t feel like that much. Not after all the other ways he and Travis have touched each other. Travis’ body is so warm under Nolan’s palm it makes him ache and shudder; Travis’ fingertips are calloused and soft and making little rubbing motions across Nolan’s skin.

Nolan’s still holding Travis’ present to him in one hand, right in front of his stomach. His ears are ringing, and his head still hurts. 

He can feel his nostrils flare as he sucks in a deep, overwhelmed breath. He stares down at Travis, nervous and hungry, and Travis just fucking studies him, his eyebrows furrowed, looking back and forth between each of Nolan’s eyes.

He shifts his grip on Nolan’s jaw, tilting Nolan’s chin down, and leans up, his face so close to Nolan’s it’s overwhelming, and presses a warm, soft kiss right over the curve of the bone under Nolan’s eye; right where Nolan’s migraines always throb the worst, although he’s two hundred percent sure Travis doesn’t know that. 

Nolan shakes out a breath, and Travis shifts a little, dragging his kiss down Nolan’s cheek, so slow and smooth and softer than Nolan would have ever fucking guessed, and then pulls away, but barely. He keeps his hands on Nolan’s face, stays leaned up, his mouth close, his eyes shifting over to catch on Nolan’s. Nolan just stares at him, mouth open, feeling. Feeling fucking delicate and scared, wanting Travis so much his hands are shaking, his fingers rustling the paper of the gift he’s still holding.

“I’ll see you next week,” Travis says. Nolan swallows, a loud gulp they can both hear. 

Travis presses his thumb up against the underside of Nolan’s throat, pushes Nolan’s head up, then hooks his thumb over the curve of Nolan’s chin to pull it back down, forcing him to nod, then giving him this huge, cocky smile before dropping his hands and pulling away. 

“Okay,” Nolan says, his voice coming out deeper than he’s ever heard it.

“You better answer my call on Christmas,” Travis says, still grinning.

“I’m not the one who ignored your calls for three months,” Nolan says, joking, even though he didn’t think this was something he’d ever joke about, even though he can barely even think. Travis’ eyebrows shoot up. 

“Ouch, Patty,” he says, chuckling, his eyes sparkling, and Nolan just can’t stop staring at him, feeling his lips sliding over his cheek, trying to soak up the sound of his laugh. 

He’s so intent on Travis that he jumps when a knock bangs through the door.

“I guess it’s Nico,” Nolan says dumbly, then stares at Travis’ ass as Travis turns away and goes to answer the door. 

***

The drive to the cabin feels a hundred times better than Nolan’s last flight did. Nico lets Nolan pick the music, Charlie sleeps peacefully in the backseat, and the swish of cars passing by on the interstate makes Nolan feel loose and chill. His migraine doesn’t get better, but it doesn’t get worse, which Nolan basically counts as a win.

Nico insists that they play I-spy for like a half hour, but even that’s not too bad, because Nolan keeps making up shit that he can’t actually see and Nico keeps not catching on; telling Nico, “I spy something bright purple” when there’s nothing but white and brown and bright blue for miles around them, and then just sitting back and staring out the window, grinning as Nico frowns and twists his neck all around, tries to look back behind them to see if he missed it. 

Nico waits until they’re an hour out of Philly to bring up Travis: “So are you still being crazy about Teeks?” Nolan glares over at him, and Nico sighs. “Okay, but if you’re not going to talk to me about this then don’t start telling me how--” he makes his voice low and slow in a terrible imitation of Nolan--“‘Travis would love ice fishing on this pond,’ ‘I gotta send Travis a pic of this.’”

“I _won’t,_ ” Nolan snaps, because he’s not a fucking teenager with a crush.

The cabin is in the middle of nowhere, down a bunch of curving roads with low speed limits, and then a bunch of bumpy gravel paths that Nolan wouldn’t really even call roads.

It’s clean and rustic and smells like cedar and smoke, and Nolan feels like he could just roll in the scent all day. The walls are made out of actual logs, and stupid Nico gets a sliver from running his hand along one within their first thirty seconds inside.

 _Travis would love it here,_ Nolan thinks. 

Nico and Nolan pick out their bedrooms, throw their stuff in, and then put Charlie on his leash and walk around outside. There are a bunch of dead brown trees, a few still green-ish fir trees. The ground is covered in snow, but it’s a few days old and half-melted, so it’s crunchy and grey and not as pretty as it was in the picture, but Nolan still loves it, and Charlie does too, jumping around and biting at the snow and finding sticks and pinecones to hold in his mouth. 

There’s a little frozen pond out back, and an hour after they get there, Nico and Nolan go out on it and Nolan skates for the first time in four months. 

“Are you sure you want to?” Nico asks him as they lace up. “You probably suck now and you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of me.” 

Nolan ignores him, yanks his skates tight at the top, and picks his way through crusty snow to the edge of the pond. The snow’s all blown off it, so the ice is clean and pretty flat, and it’s easy and thoughtless for Nolan to step onto it and take a few clomping steps and then just skate.

Nolan’s been skating since he was fucking three, so it shouldn’t surprise him that he hasn’t forgotten how, but he lets out a deep, tense breath anyway when he realizes he can move around easy, no problem. 

After that, being on the ice again is just fun. He and Nico mess around, racing and chasing Charlie. Neither of them brought their sticks, but they run a few plays, swinging empty hands, pretending they’re shooting at a net that doesn’t exist.

In bed that night, Nolan feels exhausted in a clean, worked over way that he hasn’t felt in forever, and he goes to sleep without even trying. 

***

The next morning, Nolan wakes up with an erection that he depressingly figures is his first in almost two months. Between having migraines and being a little depressed and getting fucked up over Travis, Nolan hasn’t really thought about sex much all season, which is weird, because it’s not like he’s not into sex. Or, like, the idea of sex, anyway. He’s spent, like, a gross amount of time over the last two years getting off while watching porn or thinking about Travis or, usually, both. 

And now that he realizes it’s been forever since he’s jerked off, he’s suddenly so fucking horny. So, like, yeah, Nico’s in the next room and the walls are so thin he could hear Nico snoring through them, but whatever, Nolan’s going for it. 

He kicks his blanket off and gets his hand around his cock, already red and a little shiny at the head. Shifts his hips to get comfy and watches his hand moving up and down, chewing on the insides of his cheeks.

He’s got a long ass list of Travis fantasies that range from tame and soft to absolutely ridiculous and totally unrealistic, but with things basically out in the open with Travis, it’s, like, actually possible that soon Nolan will actually be doing something with him soon, so he figures maybe he should think about what it is they’re _actually_ going to do.

Nolan looks down at his dick again. Travis has seen it fucking tons already, so it’s not like he’s going to be surprised by it or anything either way, but Nolan’s still happy that it’s pretty nice looking; cut and, like, normal shaped, and also, big. 

He knows that Travis isn’t going to expect him to be a fucking pro in bed or anything; that Travis is patient and chill when it matters, and that he’s not going to, like, give up on Nolan if he’s not as good as Travis is used to right away. But he kind of wants to like fucking blow Travis’ mind.

Nolan’s pretty sure he’ll be good at sucking dick, so maybe he’ll start there, he thinks, squeezing a bit at the head of his cock on an upstroke. It seems easier than just diving right in and fucking Travis, anyway. Or, shit, having Travis fuck _him,_ which is a whole other layer of terrifying that Nolan can’t even think about.

But maybe Nolan’ll let Travis suck _his_ dick first, so he can get some ideas for what to do and what not to do, what feels good. Travis has probably blown plenty of guys before, and he’ll know exactly where to lick at Nolan, what rhythm to use, how to tighten his lips and swallow Nolan’s cum. Maybe he’ll know how to deep throat. Maybe after he’s made Nolan come, he’ll tell Nolan to get on his knees and will just fuck his mouth, and Nolan won’t have to worry about anything but keeping his lips open and his teeth out of the way. 

He’s seen Travis’ dick just like Travis has seen his: neither of them are shy, and they’ve had two years of showering together in locker rooms and sharing hotel rooms: Travis’ cock isn’t as big as Nolan’s, but it looks perfect on his body; long-ish and slim-ish, and he always keeps his hair down there nicely groomed, and Nolan figures it'll taste clean and Travis-y and Travis will be the perfect combination of careful and not-careful, pulling Nolan’s hair and pushing at his throat and making sure he doesn’t choke, like, too much. 

The idea of Travis maybe making him choke on it _some,_ though, makes Nolan close his eyes and thrust needy and quick up into his hand and come hard, trying to ignore the fact that his bed is squeaking loud enough that Nico can for sure hear it. 

When he comes out of his room thirty minutes later, after a shower in lukewarm, coppery-smelling well water, Nico is sitting in a rocking chair in the living room holding a cup of coffee, looking like a fucking grandpa. He raises an eyebrow at Nolan, looks him up and down, and then just says, “Sup," all judgy. Nolan ignores him, and Nico lets it go.

They spend the whole rest of the day doing basically nothing. Taking Charlie out for little walks, seeing who can throw a pinecone the furthest, snacking, just talking about whatever comes up, but it feels like so much more than doing nothing in Philly does. It’s the kind of doing nothing Nolan used to do at home, when he had time off from hockey and just got to hang out with his family for a few days; when doing nothing was precious and special and not just his whole fucking life.

***

On Christmas morning, he and Nico wake up early and sit on the couch just inside the big plate windows on the south side of the cabin and watch a group of deer mill around by the treeline, craning their necks down to sift their noses through the snow, looking for food. 

Nico sighs contentedly, and Nolan lets himself just smile. “Merry Christmas, Nolly,” Nico says.

“Merry Christmas, Nicky,” Nolan says after a minute spent trying to make his voice sound as genuine as possible. “Thanks for bringing me here.” 

They make brunch together in the cramped kitchen. Nico, who admittedly knows about a thousand times more about cooking than Nolan does, bosses Nolan around, and Nolan bitches back at him. Nolan calls him a fucking dickhead over what exactly “golden brown” is, and Nico tells him, “you are the stupidest person.” 

Nolan feels cheesy and emotional and Christmasy about the whole thing, so when Nico sets down a frittata he made from all organic ingredients he brought from Newark in a cooler, Nolan puts an arm around his shoulders and gives him a quick sideways hug.

“Awwww,” Nico coos as he pulls away, “You love me!” 

“No,” Nolan tells him. 

The brunch they made is decent--too eggy french toast and too vegetable-y frittata and “virgin mimosas” that are just orange juice. 

After they’re done eating, they both head back to their rooms for a while to call their families and nap, and then come back out to sit on the couch and look out the window some more. It’s starting to snow, so Nico sings “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” over and over and over in this crazy loud fucking _opera_ voice until Nolan wants to strangle him, but it does look pretty out, and Charlie is cuddled up against Nolan’s thigh, and he feels happy. 

Travis video calls Nolan as Nico’s making dinner. “Merry Christmas!” he says loudly, the camera right up against his face. Then he turns it around, and his whole big fucking family is there, gathered around a fireplace and smiling and waving and saying “Hi Nolan!” 

“Oh. Merry Christmas,” Nolan says, and Travis is already turning the camera back to himself, the picture getting bouncy as he stands up and walks, calling, “Okay, you saw him,” back over his shoulder, and then Nolan sees him shutting a door behind himself, and then he just smiles at Nolan for a second, and, whatever, Nolan’s been poisoned by this quaint fucking Hallmark cabin, so he just smiles back.

“How’s your trip?” Travis asks.

“It’s good,” Nolan tells him. “The cabin is pretty nice, actually. We saw a ton of deer out the window this morning.” 

“Oh _man._ Me and my dad and Chase went out scouting yesterday and didn’t see a single one for _hours._ " 

"Guess you're not as good a hunter as me.”

“Oh, totally that's it," Travis rolls his eyes, his cheeks curving up and his eyes getting all cute and squinty. “Hey,” he says, his face abruptly serious: “Present time.” 

Nolan grabs his gift from Travis from the coffee table in front of him and props his phone on his knee as he slides the paper off, then opens the box inside, then the envelope inside that, rolling his eyes and heaving out sighs at every layer, making Travis laugh.

“Oh,” he says, when he finally gets through all the wrapping. There are two tickets wrapped up in a poster for a one-day music festival on Valentine's Day. Nolan’s heard of the festival already, because it’s in New York, barely an hour and a half from Nolan’s place in Philly, and Mt. Joy and like four more of Nolan’s top ten favorite bands are playing. But Nolan doesn’t really know anyone in Philly who both has the same taste in music in him and would want to spend Valentine's Day with him instead of, like, their girlfriends or wives, and also, the concert's in only two months, and who knows where Nolan's head will be at by then.

“They’re for you and me!” Travis says excitedly, and then, when Nolan takes a second to respond and just stares down at the tickets, a little more cautiously, “A few bands you like are gonna be there. Or, if you don’t like them anymore that’s fine, I can get you something else.”

“No, Trav,” Nolan says, looking up to meet Travis’ eyes and smiling at him even though he’s feeling shaky. “This is the best. I love all these bands.” Travis starts to smile, and this is the best gift anyone other than Nolan’s mom has ever given him, but Nolan has to tell Travis. “I just don’t know if I’ll be better by then.” 

Travis’ face twitches into this crazy, confused look, face all scrunched up, eyes skeptical. “Well, that’s okay, though,” he says. “It’s a lot of acoustic stuff so I don’t think there will be that many lights or anything too crazy, and we’re pretty far back so you don’t have to dance or anything, and you said sound doesn’t bother you, right? I mean, if you start feeling bad or if you’re having a bad day that day that’s fine, I’ll get us tickets for something else another time, but, like. We can just go and you can close your eyes or something and just listen, too. You could wear that sushi mask thing, even." 

Nolan feels wobbly. “Teeks,” he says. Travis doesn’t even _like_ this kind of music.

“It doesn’t have to be a date if you still don't want to then," he says quickly, his face sincere. "Just because it’s Valentine's Day, it doesn’t matter.”

Nolan looks down at the tickets, and then back up. “Thanks,” he says, and it’s not even close to everything Travis deserves to hear. 

Travis has always been easy though; has never made Nolan work hard or say shit when he sucks at talking or pretend to be good at having feelings, so he just smiles a little fakely at Nolan and tells him, “You’re welcome, bud. Okay, my turn!”

Travis twists and reaches behind him, his shirt pulling against his ribs, and then comes up with a wrapped package that is definitely not the one Nolan gave him. He rips into it in like two seconds, so Nolan barely has time to take in the Santa-printed wrapping paper that was definitely not what the lady at the shop he went to used, doesn’t have time to tell Travis that he’s opening someone else’s present. 

“Oh wow!” Travis says, holding up what _is_ actually Nolan’s gift to him--a framed print with a dumb little quote on it about being kind, and then a couple handmade cards with puns and cute drawings of animals on them. “Patty, this is awesome!” Travis says, his voice nervous and exaggerated like he’s a kid lying to his parents. 

“Bud,” Nolan says in literal shock. “Did you open it and rewrap it?”

Travis’ lips twist into a scowl. “Okay, well,” he starts, then pauses. “Yeah.”

And then he and Nolan are both cracking up, Nolan throwing his head back and laughing until his cheeks hurt and he has tears in his eyes. 

Nico ducks into the living room, smiling and looking surprised, and comes over to drop onto the couch next to Nolan, leaning in so Travis can see him.

“Hey Konecny,” he says. 

“Hey Nico,” Travis says, still laughing a little. 

Nolan turns to Nico starting to tell him about how Travis is a fucking child, but then Nico is leaning closer to the camera and saying “Nolan said he thinks this would be a great place for you guys’ honeymoon, do you think--”

“What, fuck you,” Nolan says, choking out another laugh and shoving at Nico.

And at the same time, Travis lights up and says, “I would love a woods honeymoon!” Nolan watches Nico raise an eyebrow in their half of the video, then watches his own cheeks get red and Travis’ eyes widen. “Hypothetically,” Travis adds.

Nico leans out of the frame after that, giving Nolan this calm, cocky, ‘my work here is done’ type look, but he stays on the couch, and Nolan is too conscious of him listening to everything he and Travis say, and so he says bye after a few minutes. Hangs up after a sappy, “I can’t wait to see you again, buddy. Tell Charlie I love him and I haven’t forgotten him,” from Travis, and then glares sideways at a long, judgy, annoying as fucking anything look from Nico. 

***

On New Year's Eve, Nico gives Nolan shit all day about the fact that Nolan’s never been to a gay club, and by nine o’clock Nolan’s so over it that he gives in, puts on his skinny jeans, gets in Nico’s big SUV, and lets himself be driven into town. 

The gay club Nico raved so much about looks like a fucking dive bar, made out of logs just like Nico and Nolan’s AirBnb, with a big lit-up sign that says “Davy’s Lodge” with a picture of a shotgun on it. They have to park in the back, in a gravel parking lot that’s half full of construction equipment and backs up onto a ravine. 

Nolan can’t drink, so he sits at the bar and sips water while Nico drinks a virgin pina colada, because, whatever, he's a good friend. They both point out a few hot people in the crowd, then some weird people. Nico tries to get Nolan to talk to a few guys and Nolan just keeps staring at his phone whenever they come over, scrolling through Instagram while everyone around them gets drunker and drunker.

After an hour of sitting at the bar with Nico, mumbling as little as possible as Nico talks to anyone who comes near them, somehow getting them to tell him their fucking life stories within like three seconds, Nolan's feeling hazy like he is actually drunk. Maybe just because he’s around so many other people who are, maybe because he's so displaced, surrounded by all these logs all the time, stuffed into this crowded bar with music pumping louder than anything he’s been around in months. 

It seems like every single person in the bar is well dressed and attractive and smooth and experienced, guys dancing together and hitting on each other and making out casually in booths. 

Nolan can’t stop thinking about Travis. About the times he’s seen Travis dance when they’ve been out at a club with the team, running his hands over his own chest, swaying neatly and grinding his ass on nothing, or, jokingly, on Claude or Jake, who would take it, stone-faced, for a couple seconds before pointing Travis toward Nolan, always sitting back at the table, and telling him to drink water. About the couple of times during the first months he knew Travis when he saw Travis making out with girls in bars, putting his arm around their shoulders and leading them out.

Can’t stop thinking about his half-stressful half-hot masturbation thoughts from the other day, worrying again about how the fuck he’s supposed to make Travis feel good when he doesn’t know fucking _anything._

Also about how Nolan's supposed to get what he wants from Travis when his body is so fucked up he went two months without getting an erection. 

Nolan's spent the last six days in the cabin with Nico and Charlie feeling happy and peaceful and not even in that much pain, but sitting in this uncomfortable wooden barstool surrounded by all these people having fun and being hot and kissing and laughing, Nolan gets this hit of worry and fucking wanting so hard and out of nowhere he feels like he's getting checked into the boards. 

_I wish Travis was here_ , he thinks for the thousandth time that weekend. 

“Hey!” Nico shouts right in Nolan's ear, “I was gonna dance quick, are you good?” Nolan looks over Nico’s shoulder to a huge, muscular guy standing right up against Nico’s back and just fucking _hopes_ that Nico’s not going to try and bring him back to the cabin, with its thin walls and squeaky fucking beds. 

“Go for it,” he says.

And then he’s alone at the bar, thinking about Travis, watching every single person around him look more comfortable and sexy and grown-up than Nolan is, and he decides he needs to kiss someone. 

Nolan knows he's way too old to have never been kissed. He’s known it for fucking years, but ever since he’s known Travis it hasn’t really seemed like a big deal, because Nolan’s kind of felt, the whole time, like he’s on his way to getting his first kiss. Like, he’s known who it’s going to be with and known it’s going to happen eventually, so what’s the point of worrying about it. And yeah, maybe it isn't normal to take years and years to kiss the guy you want to be with, but Nolan had been fine with being weird, especially when it was him and Travis being weird together. 

He never meant to turn twenty-one and still be a virgin and shit. He's not religious or anything; he's always just been scared about kissing some random person who didn't even get him. But maybe it's better to have his first kiss with someone he'll never see again, in this tiny town in Pennsylvania, instead of with Travis, who he needs to love him and want him and not think that he's, like, a total freak who doesn't know what to do with his tongue. 

He thinks about Travis telling him it had been almost two years since he'd hooked up with anyone else. Nolan wouldn't even think about actually having sex with anyone other than Travis, but this is just--just nothing. Practice so that he can be anything like what Travis deserves, so that he won't feel so stupid and out of it when Travis tries to kiss him for real. He's not even close to actually feeling anything for this guy, so what does it fucking matter if he kisses him for two seconds? Just practice, to figure out the mechanics; just like running a hockey drill with different linemates. 

Nolan spins on his barstool to stare at the guy sitting next to him. He looks nothing like Travis or like anything Nolan would be into even in a world where Travis didn’t exist--skinny and blonde and pale. But no one in the bar is going to be what Nolan’s into either way, because Travis is all the way up in Ontario and Nolan is in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. 

“Hey,” Nolan says, straining to make his voice loud enough to hear over the music. The guy turns to look at him, checks him out, and then smiles. 

“Hey,” he says. 

Nolan learns that his name is Trevor, that he was born here in this random small town that Nolan doesn’t actually know the name of, that he’s looking for someone to kiss at midnight, which he says with a smile and a hand on Nolan’s arm. 

“How about at, like, 10:35?” Nolan asks, and then tries to do his best, ‘okay I’m ready to be kissed face,’ but the guy just gives him a weird look. Which, whatever, because Travis can probably read him a hundred times better than this rando, and he’ll probably know when Nolan’s ready to be kissed without Nolan making a weird face, anyway. “You can kiss me right now,” he adds, just to make it one hundred percent clear. The guy grins up at him, and puts a hand on Nolan’sshoulder and leans into the space between their barstools. 

Nolan wets his lips and swallows, his tongue suddenly feeling like it doesn’t fit in his mouth, his lips weirdly pursed and, like, too-spitty, and he's irrationally scared that he might throw up on this dude if they kiss, not because he thinks it will be so gross or anything but just because--and then there’s a hand on his shoulder yanking him back from the guy, and Nico saying, “Sorry, he’s crazy” to Trevor and pulling Nolan through the crowd of people and then out of the bar, into the shock of cold outside, yelling, "Are you drunk or _what,_ " back at Nolan as he leads him through the rough gravel parking lot.

“Dude, what the heck,” Nico says after he slams the door to his huge SUV. “I brought you out to have a fun gay experience but you don’t have to suck some guy’s dick just be _cause._ ” He starts the car and the headlights come on, lighting up the tangle of trees and fallen branches in the ravine in front of them, and then he backs out and pulls onto the road.

Nolan already looks stupid, so he just tells Nico the whole thing. About how he's never kissed anyone before and how he’s a virgin and how he’s scared he’s going to suck at everything, and about how Travis has been with fifty people and it's not that Nolan _minds,_ but that he wants to be good for Travis because he can't stand the idea of Travis not enjoying hooking up with him. 

Nico listens, his face mildly surprised, his lips pursed. “Okay, but. Dude,” he says when Nolan finishes talking, “you don’t want that to be your first kiss.”

“Well, whatever,” Nolan mumbles sullenly. “You practice with me then.”

He’s basically joking anyway, but it’s still a little offensive when Nico immediately goes, “Ew, no,” his voice all grossed out like Nolan is a fucking dog. 

“Fuck off,” Nolan grumbles.

“Besides,” Nico says, unfazed, “I think Travis...”

“Travis what?” Nolan asks when Nico trails off, narrowing his eyes and glaring across the car at Nico. 

Nico flicks on his blinker and looks at Nolan, sideways and slow, a pair of headlights cutting across his face, the whoosh of a truck passing by. “I think you deserve for him to be your first kiss,” he says, and it hits Nolan so hard and fast he has to turn away and stare out the window, his eyes aching, migraine and tears. "Like, if you love him," Nico adds softly. "Which you do, right?” 

Nico turns into the driveway and the warm lights of the cabin come into view. Nolan lets his body sway with the movement of the car; leans into the cool glass of the window. He swallows. 

He hears Nico shift the SUV into park, then turn the key back, leaving them sitting in the empty quiet. Nolan clenches his eyes closed and rolls his forehead against the door, and he’s so sick of feeling so much, of his head and his heart both hurting him. “Yeah,” he says, his breath humid against the glass. 

"I know you don't actually want to kiss someone else," Nico says. 

Nolan swallows. "No," he agrees. "I'm just worried," he says, his voice so quiet it sounds like a whimper.

Nolan's always been a pretty mellow guy. Or, like, if you ask his sisters, an emotionless robot. If he starts getting too stressed about hockey or thinking too much about a bad play or getting too mad about something another guy did on the ice, he's always just, like, taken a breath and calmed down; moved on. 

But Travis is like a set of lungs in his chest, always there, heavy and full and fucking necessary. 

"I know, man," Nico says softly, rubbing at Nolan's arm, gentle and careful for a second, like Nolan’s mom would be. Then he gives Nolan a rough pat on the shoulder and pulls away, a whoosh of cold air sliding over Nolan's skin as Nico opens his door. “But, dude, you gotta stop being so stupid.”


	9. Chapter 9

"fyi I'm in love with you," Nolan types into him and Travis' chat the next morning.

Not just because of what Nico said or because Nolan’s tired and he misses Travis, but because all the sudden the fact that Travis doesn’t know--or, like, maybe probably  _ does _ know but has never heard Nolan say it--seems crazy, because it’s so  _ so  _ fucking true. __

Nolan knows himself, and he knows that him feeling brave enough to just put it out there for Travis isn’t going to last forever, definitely isn’t going to still be there when he’s face to face with Travis, so perfect and healthy and good. 

So he pushes send, and he gets that maybe this isn’t an over-text kind of thing to say, but he can’t stop thinking about how if he sends it now, right before he and Nico leave to head back to Philly, Travis could be waiting in Nolan’s apartment for him, could look up at him with sweet soft eyes when he walks in and say, like, “You too” or whatever, and then kiss Nolan, like a happy ending. 

And then the cabin's spotty fucking rural-Pennsylvania wifi cuts out, and Nolan’s message stalls, staying pale grey in their chat instead of flashing to black, and then he gets a pop up saying it didn't send. 

Nolan breathes, presses resend, waits again, and gets the same pop up.

He doesn’t think this is a sign or anything stupid like that, but, like, maybe it’s a second chance. Maybe this is stupid, maybe he should wait for Travis to say it first. 

He drops his phone and rolls over in the tiny cabin bed to press his face into the pillow. It’s still basically dark out and so quiet it's amazing, no birds or cars or anything, just a few rustling sounds of Nico packing up his stuff to leave. 

_ Okay,  _ Nolan thinks, and then picks up his phone and tries one more time. 

His heart pulses hard in his chest, his phone whirs in his hand, grey words on white, a little exclamation mark next to the wifi symbol in the top corner and two short bars of mobile service and Travis somewhere in Philly, somehow still not knowing that Nolan loves him with every single part of himself. 

It doesn’t send. 

He bites his hard on his tongue and squeezes so hard at his phone his hand shakes. It was a stupid fucking idea anyway. 

He clicks out of the pop up for a third time, then turns his phone screen off and throws his phone in his duffel bag. 

Twenty minutes later he and Nico and Charlie are in the SUV, jolting down the rough gravel road leading away from the cabin; merging onto a highway, then an interstate. 

It’s still way too fucking early. Nolan is feeling and looking and smelling groggy and gritty, the water in his travel mug not tricking him into thinking it’s coffee  _ at all,  _ but Nico has to get back for afternoon skate and Nolan has to get back for his first-of-the-month appointment with the Flyers doctors.

Nico talks about the Devs and his family and what he’s planning on doing in the summer, and Nolan tells him a little about migraines and a podcast he’s been listening to he thinks Nico would like. They don’t talk about Travis. Nolan can’t stop thinking about him. 

Nico drops Nolan off at the rink where the team-- _ Travis-- _ will be starting practice soon and where Nolan has to meet his doctors.

He figures he’s already said enough cheesy shit to Nico over the last week, so he just hugs him across the console in the middle of the car, mumbles, “drive safe, thanks,” and gets out before Nico can get sappy. 

Every time Nolan comes in for his check-ups, he gets brought back to what he thinks is the same room he went to the last time, but when he steps inside, there’s always something different hanging on the wall across from the metal table he has to sit on. The first time it was a framed painting of pheasants flying up from a cornfield, the kind of stupid art his dad and TK would like; then it was a picture of the ocean; then a huge, detailed map of Philly. Now, he’s sitting in his underwear on the table going through the usual round of tests he doesn’t know the point of, staring at a yellow model plane hanging from the ceiling, answering the same questions he’s answered every month since this all started. 

“How many days have you had active migraines this month?”

“Sixteen.”

“How have you been doing with your workouts?”

“Good.”

“How are you feeling today?”

“Fine.” 

“Okay,” his main doctor, Roberts, says, making a little note on his clipboard. “You’re not in remission yet, but I do think it’s safe for you to go back to practice.” 

Nolan jerks his eyes away from the planes. “Today?” he asks.

And, apparently, yeah. Nolan gets told to be careful and listen to his body and stop if anything feels wrong, and then he gets brought to the lockerroom he hasn’t been in in months and given a no-contact jersey and given some gear. He sits down heavily in the stall next to Travis’--which is full of someone else’s stuff, smelling weird, feeling wrong--to pull his skates on, hands shaky. 

If he hadn’t just skated with Nico, he thinks, he would be fucking terrified. But he  _ knows,  _ he just saw, that everything still works right, that he can move on the ice and not, like, embarrass himself or pass out or whatever. 

He gears up and tries to center himself and grabs his stick, which feels familiar and unfamiliar, and one of the trainers slaps him on the shoulder and chats to him as he leads him out to the edge of the ice, where the guys are doing shooting drills.

Travis is lined up for the drill but somehow sees Nolan right away, just like Nolan's eyes go to Travis immediately. His head yanks sideways as soon as Nolan’s leaning against the outside of the boards, and then his whole body's turning so he can skate up to Nolan, moving as fast as Nolan’s ever seen him. 

“What--” Travis says, smiling up at him all giddy and wild. “Are you all better? Are you coming back? Do you--What’s happening?” Travis is happy and friendly and normal _ , _ and Nolan can’t stop thinking about the message he tried to send this morning. 

“I got cleared for no-contact,” he says. 

Travis grins with all his teeth, then hooks a leg over the boards, hops over, and wraps his arms around Nolan’s shoulders. “Fucking rights, Patty,” he says, voice low and rough and excited.

Nolan can feel Travis’ breath on his neck, the scruff at the side of his chin rubbing against his throat. Travis smells like ice and the tea tree shampoo he’s started using, spicy and minty, and he’s warm and sturdy and just keeps leaning into the hug, and Nolan  _ wants  _ him.

Travis pulls away and yanks Nolan onto the ice, watching him all close, and when Nolan doesn’t fall over right away or anything, Travis smiles at him like he’s scored a fucking Cup winning goal. 

Most of the rest of the guys skate by Nolan, bumping fists with him and telling him welcome back and whatever, and then AV shakes his hand and smiles at him and whistles and tells everyone to get back to it, and Nolan gets in line and starts running drills.

He feels normal and good and  _ back  _ for about five fucking seconds before he misses an easy pass to set him up for a shot and no one says anything and it gets clear that everyone in the entire organization is trying to handle him with kid gloves. They stick him with Claude on every drill like he’s some Russian guy new to the league who needs a fucking translator or some shit, and Claude keeps asking him, “Need a break?” and Nolan keeps telling him, “I’m fucking fine,” and everyone stays like ten feet away from him on the ice and all the coaches are constantly barking “Patrick, you good?” 

After an hour his legs are sore and his eyes hurt and he feels fucking pathetic and he wants to just bitch at every person who does something nice to him.

He knows most Flyers fans and media people think playing with migraines shouldn’t be a big deal. Guys around the league play with broken feet and half torn shoulders and fucked up wrists. Nolan’s played injured, too, like his whole fucking time in Brandon and his entire first season in the NHL. 

Before he’d ever had a migraine, he would’ve thought he could play through a fucking headache no problem.

But there's pushing through pain, fine, Nolan's a pro at it, and then there's pushing through all the other way more complicated things that come with migraines, and what it comes down to is: how's he supposed to play when looking at the white of the ice and being shined on by lights from above is so glinting, blinding bright that--forget the pain of it, forget that it's like icicles in his skull--he literally can’t focus on the puck. 

He does his best to just keep skating as good as he can and to stare into the middle distance whenever he’s not on the ice. Travis keeps watching him, skating up to his elbow whenever Nolan finishes a drill and saying, "Killed it, Pats," and "Sick little sauce," and Nolan keeps trying to smile at him but to look to everyone else like a dumb fucking statue, so the trainers and the other guys will think he’s not up to talking and leave him alone. 

Practice ends and Nolan’s exhausted and relieved and ready to go back to the apartment with Travis, and then one of the trainers yells at everyone to get ready to take the season’s team picture, and Nolan almost fucking wishes he never got cleared for practice in the first place.

He drops his shampoo in the shower and stares at it, dripping out onto the tile floor, for a long moment, dreading the sickening head rush he knows he’s gonna get when he bends down. From beside him, Jake says, quiet and sincere, “You want me to get that?”

“No,” Nolan says immediately, in his bitchiest voice, then bends down to get it and--thankfully; barely--keeps from falling against the wall of the shower.

Travis is on his other side, naked and wet, but Nolan doesn't even really have the brain power to wash his own hair, so he can’t think about Travis’ body right there, Travis’ eyes on him so obvious every guy in the showers must notice. 

Nolan follows Travis up into the stands and drops into the seat he gets pointed at. Travis is hyper next to him, talking to all the guys around them, turning to Nolan over and over and asking him jokey questions, and Nolan wants to mess around with him, wants to be nice to him, but mostly he just wants to go home with him, to cuddle up in the dark and not have to talk. 

So he just shifts his jaw forward and sucks on his teeth and glares into the stands. 

One of the photographers shouts something, his voice echoing in the rink, and then everyone around Nolan’s standing up, and Travis is saying, “That’s us, buddy, get up,” and Nolan’s just staring at nothing, feeling half there and two steps behind.

Travis’ hand wraps around his arm and pulls, and Nolan goes with him, weakly; lets Travis half haul him up, and then wants to collapse back down, press his head against the seat in front of his, go throw up in the cool quiet of the locker room. 

“Thanks,” he tells Travis, leaning into him for a second and then glaring forward for the picture.

Nolan feels better outside of the rink, in Travis’ familiar smelling car, with Travis driving with one hand on the wheel and one tucked between own thighs. 

Nolan swallows. “I missed you,” he says. 

Travis smiles softly over at him. “You too.” 

“How was your Christmas?” Nolan asks, because he wants to know and wants to talk about anything other than the shitshow of a practice he just barely made it through, and Travis lights up, gets all energetic as he tells Nolan about a card he got his dad, about hunting with his brother but not getting a single thing, about the weather up in Chatham and how much snow there was and how good it was to be back home. 

Nolan wants to kiss him. 

Back at the apartment, he follows Travis up to his place and pauses right inside the door. Travis has already got the sign Nolan got him for Christmas hung up, right in his entryway where he’ll see it every time he comes in and out of the apartment.

Travis flops down onto the couch. Grabs the remote from the coffee table, turns on the TV then mutes it.

Nolan waits for a minute, and then goes and sits right up next to Travis, and feels Travis’ hand sink into his hair as soon as he’s settled into the couch cushions. Nolan looks at him, and he’s already looking back. 

"Are you ready?" he asks, quiet and careful, his voice slipping out slow and serious and rumblingly low.

Nolan's so ready to be with Travis, to be kissed by him, to tell him he loves him, that his chest pulses. He’s got a migraine behind his eyes and apparently he sucks at hockey and maybe he'll never get better and never play again, but he's got Travis right in front of him, too, hot and patient and perfect, and so fuck everything else. 

It shouldn't be hard to say that, but Nolan can't fucking do it.

He cups a palm on Travis’ cheek, clumsy and maybe too rough, the heel of his hand bumping against Travis’ chin, his fingers sliding over Travis’ skin, smooth and soft, and he looks at Travis and hopes he gets it.

"It's okay bud, you don't have to talk,” Travis breathes, shifting up on his knees. “I get it.” He tips closer to Nolan, and Nolan stares into his eyes, brown and wide and open. “I got you.” 

Travis kisses him. 

Like, Travis leans forward until he’s so close that Nolan can only focus on one of his eyes, then reaches out and runs his thumb under the curve of Nolan’s eyelid. Nolan closes his eyes, and then Travis’ lips brush against his, so light it tickles.

Travis’ lips pull away and then press closer; shift and tilt and open. His tongue runs over Nolan’s bottom lip, between his two front teeth and up against his gums, under his tongue. One of Travis’ hands clenches in Nolan's hair and the other grips his jaw and tilts his head where Travis wants it.

It’s like every single part of Travis all at once: intense and soft, patient and fast, quiet and so loud Nolan can’t fucking think. His head thrums and his hands shake on Travis’ waist, and Travis makes all these fucking noises against his mouth, “hmm” like he’s learning something interesting, “ _ oh _ ” like he’s shocked, “ _ Nolan _ ” like he’s dying.

Nolan’s scoring every goal he’s ever scored; is sitting on that bench outside Travis’ cabin with Travis in his lap on the best night of his life; is aching all over with feeling, hard against the front of his sweats, open and out of it and fucking crazy for it. 

Travis’ lips shift against Nolan’s, getting tight and hard instead of plushy and soft, his kiss getting toothier. And then he fucking  _ laughs,  _ a rush of an exhale into Nolan’s mouth, and what the fuck is that. Nolan cups a hand around Travis’ shoulder and pushes him an inch away. “What--” Nolan says, frowning.

“Sorry,” Travis cuts him off immediately, his cheeks crinkling up under his eyes. He leans in and presses his forehead to Nolan’s. “I’m just happy,” he says, smiling right into Nolan’s face, his voice warm and joyful and exactly how Nolan wants to make him sound for the rest of his life. 

"Stop smiling," Nolan grumbles, then leans up and kisses him, a little clumsy but whatever. And it’s so dumb and cheesy and Nolan actually fucking hates it, but they both smile against each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is inspired by [the great TK and Patty moments in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1iQpsOL8ek), and especially by the fact that after Travis tells Nolan, “Stand up buddy” and helps him up Nolan says “Thanks,” and it’s one stupid word but it is so cute and sweet and sad and I love it so much.


	10. Chapter 10

Travis’ plan to give Patty the whole virginity experience--blue balls and rounding the bases one at a time and going even just a little bit slow--goes to hell when Pat tugs at Travis’ waist and makes a grumpy little noise that is so Pat and so cute and so bossy and needy and hot that Travis can’t not tell himself,  _ okay, one more thing, _ and let Patty pull him over his lap. And once he’s there with Pat's huge thighs between his and with the  _ ridiculous  _ tent of Pat’s dick in his sweatpants right in front of him, he can’t not thrust forward to rub their dicks together, hard, dull pressure through layers of clothes making Pat’s eyes blink wide open and Travis’ balls ache. 

The whole thing goes more to hell when he sticks his hands under Pat’s shirt and pushes it halfway up his chest and Pat raises his big ass arms and then just  _ waits,  _ looking at Travis like, _ come on _ , leaving it to him to pull the shirt up and off. And then when Travis is up on his knees trying to reach the tips of Pat’s fingers so he can loop Pat’s t-shirt over them, Pat kisses the middle of Travis’ abs and things go even more to hell, because that means when he settles back down he has to kiss Pat’s nipples, which are tiny on his huge chest and the same color pink as his cheeks, and apparently are as sensitive as his fucking dick from the way Pat gasps when Travis sucks them.

But if Travis is being real, his whole plan to be careful and slow and smooth went to hell way earlier, when Pat spent their whole time at the rink  _ not  _ looking at Travis in this way that was so heavy Travis couldn’t breath, and then spent their whole ride home, walk up the stairs, and trip to the couch not looking  _ away  _ from Travis, in this way that got Travis half hard in his shorts in the middle of traffic.

Travis is pretty cocky about the fact that he’s one of only a few people in the world who can really read Pat, but he thinks that literally anyone would have got how badly Patty was wanting to be kissed with the way he’d been just, like,  _ eating  _ Travis  _ up  _ with his eyes. 

And Travis has been dying to kiss Pat for years, has been getting off thinking about being Pat’s first kiss basically nightly--and honestly pretty much morningly, too--ever since Pat told him he’d never kissed anyone else. 

So Travis thought he was fucking  _ ready  _ , but shit, Patty in his hundreds of fantasies is nothing compared to Patty in real life--his lips so soft and full, his mouth opening up, pulling Travis in, licking him and moving against him, not scared or slow for a second, because Pat’s so fucking intent; Pat can make himself good at anything he wants to be good at; Pat is probably the best person in the world at making Travis feel good. 

“Fuck,” Travis breathes out as Patty thrusts up a few times, his hands holding Travis’ hips, his dick so fucking big it makes Travis shiver and clench. He ducks down to kiss Pat’s neck, cupping his jaw and tilting it up to expose the long, pale line of his stubbly throat. “You’re awesome,” he tells Patty, leaning down to suck at his pulse, lick sweat off his collarbone, open his mouth up and just cover as much of Patty's skin as he can. 

After a while of that they’re at a point where, well, like, Travis’ dick is hard, and Patty’s dick is hard, and they’ve been making out so long Travis’ mouth is sore, so, like. It’s time to either stop or keep going.

Travis pulls back from Pat, their lips splitting apart noisily, both of them slick with spit. “Hey,” he pants, looking at Pat who’s just  _ staring _ up at him. “I wanted to go slow,” Travis tells him, running his fingers deep into the hair at the back of Pat’s head. “But, uh,”  _ But now the idea of going slow sounds fucking insane.  _ “What do you want to do?” Pat just tips his head back into Travis' hand and looks at him like he’s not even thinking of talking. “Come on, Patty,” Travis bugs him, yanking his hair a little. 

“I want to come,” Pat mumbles, his eyes still just, like, absorbing Travis, and  _ yup, sounds good.  _

“Mmmm,” Travis says stupidly, diving back into Pat’s mouth and grinding down on his dick. 

“But I don't--,” Pat says into his mouth, putting a hand on Travis’ chest and just barely pushing. Travis pulls back a half an inch to look at Pat, who looks off to the side and avoids eye contact. “--know how to do shit,” he says in his grumpy, guarded voice. 

_ Aw, _ Travis thinks, his whole body feeling full with how much he loves Patty, how cute and sweet he is. “You’re okay babe, that’s okay, I’ll take care of you, okay?”

Pat glances at him, looking shy and annoyed, and then looks away, setting his face, making it hard and blank. “Stop saying okay, I’m not a fucking baby.” 

“Okay baby,” Travis says immediately, grinning at Pat, who’s still looking off to the side, not meeting Travis’ eyes. Pat narrows his eyes, looks up at Travis to glare at him, and then huffs a laugh out from the back of his throat. 

“You’re so dumb.” 

Travis smiles and takes his hand out of Pat’s hair and brings it down between them to wrap it around the head of Patty's dick through his sweats, and Patty’s glare gets harder and softer at the same time. “Can I jerk us off?” Travis asks, his voice coming out rough. 

Pat’s eyes widen a little, like he’s surprised by that. “I guess,” he breaths. 

Travis smiles up at him again, and then makes a circular gesture with his hand. “You wanna switch? Wanna get on top?”

Pat looks at him for a second, then just barely nods. Travis rolls off him and lands on his ass on the couch, and takes the half a second before Pat crawls over him, all long limbs and huge erection, to yank his own shorts and underwear halfway down his thighs, so rough that his dick gets caught for a sec and then smacks up against his stomach. 

Pat pauses once he’s over Travis, staying kind of raised up on his knees, and when Travis looks up at him he finds Pat’s eyes glued to his dick the same way they’d been glued to his face earlier, and that makes Travis’ whole body warm and tingly; makes precum wet the head of his cock

He reaches down and strokes himself, slow and showy, pulling at his foreskin, and Pat’s breath is so heavy it sounds like he’s just come off the hardest shift of his life. 

“Get your dick out and get down here,” Travis says, because bossing Patty around is, like, in his top three fucking fantasies, so he should really figure out now if Patty's into it or not. 

Pat doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make a face: just does what Travis says. Gets his hands on the waistband of his sweats and pulls them out and down, exposing his huge dick, pink and hard and so fucking pretty, and his heavy balls which Travis just wants to lick, then settling down on his knees so his cock is only a few inches from Travis’.

“Fuck,” Travis says, stretching out the vowels for like a full minute, because it’s really the reaction Patty deserves. And then, because Pat still just looks more stressed than anything, “Fuck, you’re big. Can’t wait to ride you later."

And then he puts one hand on Pat’s hip and yanks him closer, until their cocks are lined up together, sliding together, and then he cups the heads and squeezes them against each other.

“Oh,” Pat says, and then he finally seems to chill out, his eyes drooping half-closed and his jaw unclenching a little, his hips making little flexes up into the tight circle Travis makes with his fist. 

Travis’ mind goes fucking wild. 

He's alternating between kissing Pat and staring at their dicks slipping up and down in his fist and leaning forward to suck at Pat’s nipples and squeezing his free hand at Pat’s hip, fingers scrambling desperately on his skin, and the whole time, he just can’t stop thinking

When he was young and stupid, having his first-ever sex with his third-ever girlfriend, Melissa, she’d asked Travis, “What were you thinking about?” when they were done. Travis had been thinking about a ton of things: how hot she was and how good it felt and how awesome it was that he was having actual sex. But he’d also thought about, like, a show he saw on Animal Planet a few months before about blue whales’ mating practices; about the perfect way to conclude an essay he was supposed to turn in the next day in history; about 200 other things. And what had really stuck with him was something he’d started wondering while fingering her, that he genuinely actually wanted to hear her thoughts on: “I wonder if anyone’s ever jerked off in the Stanley Cup.” 

Melissa had been mad, obviously, even when he’d tried to explain that it wasn’t like he was distracted from what was happening or like it wasn’t good enough to hold his attention or anything. It’s just that having sex kind of, like, wakes his brain up, makes it go a million miles a minute in this way that Travis actually loves, because it means he can think a lot of things at once, and yeah, some of those things are a little bit unrelated to, like, the actual sex, but a lot of them are all about it--about every single piece of how good the other person looks and feels, about all the things they could do next, all the ways he could make the other person feel good.

The same thing happens during a hockey game. He thinks about every angle and play and guy on the other team and noise and sign in the stands, and also randomly about whether he likes cheetahs or leopards better and what he’s going to eat after the game and stuff. It’s, like, energizing. It’s part of what makes him a good hockey player.

And then after games, he lets himself just go with it, being rowdy in the locker room and talking everyone’s ears off. In their second month of friendship, Travis had followed Pat back to their hotel room after a road game and just kept saying everything he was thinking. Talking a lot was kind of a Travis thing, anyway, but around Pat, it was even more of a thing, because he had this weird creepy urge to have Patty really get him and know everything about him. 

He was breaking down every single second he’d spent on the ice, every interaction with a guy from the other team, when Pat pushed him down on to the bed, making Travis’ heartbeat stutter, and then sat down on his own bed and spread his thighs distractingly and said, “Let’s not talk about hockey.”

Travis felt a little stupid for half a second, abruptly swallowing his words, and then Pat gestured his hand out like,  _ go on,  _ and said, “Well, tell me something else.” 

He’d wanted to kiss Pat so bad then, but instead he’d just told him a story about fishing. 

Now he’s got his mouth all over Pat’s, his hand around Pat’s dick, Pat in his lap, panting and thrusting against him, and it’s just about literally everything Travis has ever wanted. 

Pat curls himself forward, his head ducking down to rest on Travis’ shoulder, so Travis can see the back of his neck, hair stuck to it with sweat and maybe a little grease, and the curved line of his spine. He spreads his free hand on the small of Pat’s back, runs it up and back down and then just rests it there, holding Pat, warm skin and thick, shifting muscle, and soaks in the heat of their dicks against each other, in his hand, wet and burning. He stares at the wall behind Pat (white except for four cream-colored, poorly patched holes from when Pat had struggled to drill in the right places to hang up the new TV he bought last year, teeth clenching tighter and tighter while Travis had given him advice/shit from the couch) and thinks about Patty’s jawline, and wonders how you get a job naming different shades of white paint. 

_ Blank slate  _ is what he’d go with for the color on Pat’s wall, he thinks, shuddering as the head of Pat’s dick pulls back Travis’ foreskin and nudges at the sensitive spot underneath.

_ Strawberries and cream  _ is kind of stupid but he thinks it’s good for the pale skin of Pat’s back, flushed spotty red in some places and shiny with sweat as Pat writhes against him.

_ Sharp white,  _ he decides on for Pat’s teeth as Pat bites into the muscle at the base of Travis’ neck.

“Babe,” Travis says, patting Pat’s back a little urgently, his voice all fucked up and scratchy, his balls getting sorer and tighter with every little thrust Patty makes up against him; his dick wet and throbbing. “Can you come soon, ya think?” Travis has like thirty more seconds in him, tops. 

“Hhhhhn,” Pat says, this crazy ass fucking whimpery little growl type thing, and then his dick is jerking against Travis’, getting both of their cocks and Travis’ hand wet and stick.

“Oh fuck, Patty, Pat Pat Pat,” Travis says, stroking up and down so fast and tight his hand cramps and then coming too, thinking about getting his cum all over Pat’s cock, thinking  _ fuck yes fuck, yes yes _ yes, and consciously deciding to  _ not  _ think about a name for the color of cum, because, gross. 

Pat’s brain must kind of shut off for a second after they’ve come, because he makes a happy little grumble and rolls his head a little sideways on Travis’s shoulder and then just stays there. 

Travis brings his clean hand up to Pat’s hair, petting it over and over again, the motion soothing and calming and nice, but his brain is still going fast, thinking that jerking off with Patty on the couch, when they don’t even really know what each other like in bed, when Patty doesn’t have, like, a tenth of the skill and experience of some of the people Travis has been with, shouldn’t have been the hottest, most intense twenty minutes of Travis’ life, but fuck was it. 

Thinking about the noise Patty made when he came, about the weight of Pat’s cock in his hand, about how big Patty’s body is, still on top of him, all hot and sweaty. 

Pat sighs against him, his breath tickling Travis’ neck, and Travis starts thinking about his vows. 

Or, okay, maybe it’s less creepy if he just thinks about it as something he’ll say to Patty someday, maybe in a couple months when it wouldn’t be too too intense, when they’re together together and he can, like, spoil Pat, be so nice to him every day that Pat’s constantly blushing and feeling proud and cocky. 

But also--Travis kind of likes thinking about saying vows with Pat. Not because he’s ready to get married because he’s fucking not, even though he already knows and has known for a long time that he wants to be with Patty for the rest of his life. But he knows he’ll be so much fucking better at writing his vows than Patty will, because Travis grew up in a house where every wall was covered in paintings of inspirational, touchy-feely sayings and because Travis has been sending personalized cards to his mom every week for years and she’s told him repeatedly that he’s “the sweetest son ever.” And Pat probably rarely even says “I love you” to his parents, and he’s mumbly when he talks in front of lots of people, so no one would be able to understand his dumb vows anyway. So like, Travis isn’t Shakespeare or anything, but Pat is even  _ less  _ Shakespeare, so Travis is definitely going to win their hypothetical vow situation. 

So while Pat half-sleeps against him, still on his knees which are definitely going to hurt when he finally gets up, Travis thinks about how he loves Pat now more than Pat two years ago, loves Pat today more than Pat last week. Loves Pat with long sloppy hair he doesn’t even try to do anything with, loves him with just his sideburns cut short because he doesn’t want his hair in his face and doesn’t give a shit if it looks stupid. Loves Pat glaring at reporters and not even pretending to be a nice Canadian boy. Loves short shorts-wearing, thirsty, grumpy Pat, and just is fucking dying to know him for the rest of their lives, to figure out all the other things he loves about him. 

And then he thinks of a few more names for colors of white. 


	11. Chapter 11

"What'd you think?" Travis says, his voice scratchy; his throat vibrating against Nolan's cheekbone. Nolan blinks. His forehead's still dropped down on Travis' shoulder where it’s been since he came, like, ten minutes ago.

Nolan’s feeling limp and sleepy and heavy and just stupidly happy, and he doesn’t realize how totally out of it he is until he mumbles, “I didn't think it would be that much better with another person” and doesn't realize Travis was being smug until it’s too late. 

Travis laughs loudly and tilts his head into Nolan’s neck, nuzzling him and saying something that Nolan honestly can’t really find room in his brain to pay attention to. 

“What?” Nolan asks, distracted, pressing his nose to Travis’ skin and breathing in. 

“Nothing buddy,” Travis laughs. “Do you wanna lay down or something?”

“Mmm,” Nolan says, “I have to have lunch.” It’s probably after his regular meal time already, and he doesn’t want to trigger a migraine by throwing his schedule off, because he literally can’t think of a day when he wants to get a migraine less. 

“Okay, let’s have lunch then,” Travis says, kissing his neck once and then pushing at his hips, urging Nolan to stand up on creaky, cramped knees, his pants still around his thighs and his cock soft and sticky with cum. “Okay, actually,” Travis says, glancing between his own dick and Nolan’s, “let’s clean up first.” 

They wash up in the bathroom together, then run down to Nolan’s apartment to pick up one of Nolan’s meals. 

“Grab me one, too,” Travis says when Nolan’s bent forward and digging around his fridge. He’s trying to find the lemon pepper chicken one, which is not too bad, but is also not something he would ever fucking feed  _ Travis _ . “I don’t want you eating that shit, order something for yourself,” he grumbles, taking his phone out of his pocket and holding it up for Travis to grab, because Travis’ is lost somewhere in his couch. Where they’d just  _ fucked,  _ but that’s, like, hard for Nolan’s brain, right now. 

Travis orders Chinese and Nolan sticks his chicken in Travis’ oven.

Then they sit on Travis’ couch and eat, and then when they’re done Travis lays down and puts his feet in Nolan’s lap and does something on his phone while Nolan reads the new issues of  _ Field and Stream  _ and  _ GQ  _ and runs his fingers lazily over TK’s ankle.

The thing is, they’re not doing anything different than what they did before--just hanging out, nothing, like, super relationshp-y or whatever. Except that Nolan can’t stop staring at Travis, knowing exactly what his dick feels like and how hard he can make Nolan come, hearing Travis saying “can’t wait to ride you later” over and over again until his dick is hard, right by the arch of Travis’ foot, and Nolan just feels--. It's stupid because he only even kissed Travis for the first time a few hours ago, but he feels settled.

Nolan’s not, like,  _ mad  _ that he didn’t get with Travis earlier. He wouldn’t give up his friendship with Travis for literally anything: not a cure for migraines, not to be the best hockey player ever, not to win the Cup. But if he’d really, like,  _ gotten _ how fucking good it was going to feel to actually be with Travis--this like sweet, heavy line hooking them, even as they just sit on the couch and do nothing--there’s no way he could’ve waited as long as he did. He’s got no idea how  _ Travis  _ waited for so fucking long when he was fully aware of how good sex is with another person and of how big of a difference there is between buddies and--whatever he and Travis are now. 

The thing is: Nolan and Travis missed two years of orgasms together because neither of them just, like, flat out said that they were into each other. And Nolan one thousand percent doesn’t want to bring this up and talk about it right now--if it was anyone in the world other than Travis, who Nolan knows he can trust to wash his hair and make him feel safe and take care of him when he feels like his head is splitting apart, he would feel too awkward to even think about saying it. But it is Travis, and, whatever, he wants to know _ ,  _ so Nolan feels his cheeks get hot and mumbles in a flat voice, “Are we dating, or what, because--” 

"Yes, dude, totally," Travis says right away, sitting up, his toes poking into Nolan’s thigh. “I mean, you want to, right?  _ I  _ want to.”

Nolan swallows. “Yeah, I want to.” He wants everything with Travis--wants to get married in some quaint little forest wedding with both their families watching, ugh, wants to wake up together every day, wants to spend the summers together in Travis’ cabin at the lake. Wants to tell every single person in the world that Travis is his. 

“Sounds good,” TK says, giving Nolan this dumb, giddy, not-even-hot grin, and Nolan’s stomach swoops and he leans in and kisses Travis, his teeth scraping Travis’ top lip and his mouth maybe, like, a little too dry at first, and Travis just grabs Nolan’s jaw and sucks his tongue into his mouth. 

Nolan doesn’t really know how guys normally indicate to other guys that they’re, like, dying to fuck them, but he figures pulling Travis into his lap and touching every single inch of his ass is, like, as clear as he’s gonna get. And he also doesn’t  _ really  _ know how to tell if someone is down to be fucked or not, but the way Travis is thrusting forward against Nolan’s abs and then back into his hands seems pretty fucking obvious.

Also, Travis pulls his lips off Nolan’s and asks, “Wanna fuck me?” so, like. 

“Uh-huh,” Nolan says, feeling like a fucking caveman.

Travis bares his teeth at him in this look that he uses when he’s doing faceoffs, intense and hot and so fucking cocky. “Okay, let me go shower really quick.” He gives Nolan a quick kiss and then hops up. “You just get in bed and wait for me, and I’m gonna get ready for that big dick.”

Nolan’s dick fucking  _ likes  _ that. “Just don’t--” Nolan blushes so hard it feels like a fever. “I want to finger you, so don’t--” He blushes harder and sets his jaw forward, worried that, like, maybe Travis isn't into that or maybe that's a thing people do together in porn and not in real life or something. 

And then Travis gives him a filthy fucking smile, yanks Nolan up off the couch. “I’ll leave all the good stuff to you, don’t worry.”

Nolan follows Travis down the hallway, staring at his ass and then watching as he slips into the bathroom and closes the door. Nolan doesn’t know  _ exactly  _ what all “getting ready for that big dick” entails, but he, like, kind of hates that any part of sex means Travis has to go off by himself. That he has to leave Nolan by himself, his mind running through all the things he might be about to do with Travis. 

Nolan gets in bed and starts touching his dick through his pants, just a little, soft fingertips skimming through fabric, trying not to get too worked up before Travis is even in the room. 

And then--fuck everything about Nolan’s life, because he blinks once, feeling fine, and then opens his eyes and feels a little shiver of pain slide through the bones of his face, and then his head hurts.

It’s not that bad, really. More of a headache than a migraine. He could probably even play through it, could definitely, like, fuck through it, if it doesn’t get any worse. It’s just an indistinct ache kind of all over his head, not even that noticeable if he’s not thinking about it, nothing compared to his worst ones, where he can’t think about anything  _ else.  _ But it’s also something that sometimes comes before his really bad migraines: an easy little bit of pain that gets him thinking,  _ this isn’t so bad,  _ right before he gets slammed with a fucking pulse of hurt that starts in the middle of his brain and radiates all the way down his limbs, then goes back into his head and settles there, leaving his whole body feeling off balance and his head feeling like it's so full of nerve endings he can’t hold it up. 

_ Don’t fucking do this,  _ Nolan is threatening his body when he hears the shower shut off. It’s not the first time he’s thought it, and, like, maybe that’s why this is all happening. Maybe he’s made his body do too much for him: make it through a shift when it felt like his ankle was snapped in half, skate down the ice when his lungs felt like they were collapsing, play over and over again when every muscle between his hip and his thigh felt like it had just fucking melted. 

Travis walks into the room naked, his dick half-hard, his hair wet. He’s so hot and perfect, all tan skin and thick muscle, and Nolan wants to crawl under the blankets and hide. “I have a headache,” he says instead, looking up and meeting Travis’ eyes. 

Travis frowns for a second but doesn’t stop walking toward the bed. He puts one knee on the mattress, making it dip a little, and then pauses, watching Nolan. “Just a headache, or?”

Nolan swallows. “Yeah, but, I don’t know if it’ll...” Travis nods, looking like he totally gets it, even though Nolan still hasn’t really talked to him about all the complicated details of how his migraines feel and work and shit. 

_ “ _ Can you...Do you wanna try anyway?” Travis asks, his voice soft. 

“Yeah,” Nolan says, the truth slipping out before he can really think about it. He bites his lip and looks sideways before he can see Travis' reaction.  _ Obviously  _ he  _ wants  _ to, but, like, if it gets worse and he can’t fucking stay hard for Travis the first time he tries to fuck him, he’ll--

Well, like. He’ll be embarrassed and he’ll feel like a little bit of a failure. But he knows Travis won’t give a shit about it, won’t ever tell anyone else in the world that it happened, won’t hold it against Nolan tomorrow or later tonight or whenever Nolan feels better. 

“Yeah, come on,” Nolan says, reaching out and pulling Travis fully onto the bed, his heart hammering, feeling like he’s jumping off a cliff. 

Travis comes easily, rolling on top of Nolan, rubbing against him like a cat, licking wetly up his throat and then taking Nolan’s earlobe between his teeth and pulling. So, okay, Nolan’s dick is definitely still into it. 

“Get naked,” Travis says in Nolan’s ear in this dumb whisper that should be cheesy and not hot. “Grab the lube, okay?” 

Nolan nods dumbly and Travis rolls off him and watches as Nolan stands at the edge of the bed and strips, feeling pretty fucking good about the way Travis’ eyes run over every piece of him all hungry and horny, then pulls open the drawer that Travis points to on his bedside table. 

And. “Oh.” Nolan’s stomach swoops and his neck heats and his cock jerks and leaks against his stomach, and he stares down at a pale beige, unquestionably dick-shaped, big-ish but smaller-than-Nolan’s-cock, dildo. Like, a dildo that Travis bought and, like, uses, apparently, because it’s right there by his bed next to an almost empty bottle of lube and a pack of wet wipes. 

He looks back over at Travis, his mind, like, going into self-defense mode and not even letting him picture Travis using it. Travis is stretched out, arms above his head, looking cocky and smirky, and Nolan realizes Travis fucking  _ wanted  _ him to see this. 

“On Etsy you can get a kit to make a custom dildo shaped like your boyfriend’s dick,” Travis says, easy. “That would be fun, huh?”

Nolan heaves out a laugh that hurts his chest, takes half a second to rehear the word  _ boyfriend,  _ then runs his hands over his eyes and glares down at Travis. “Don’t talk about Etsy in bed,” he says, instead of, like,  _ have you ever thought about me while you used this? _ or _ can I please watch.  _ He grabs the lube and a condom and drops them down on the bed, slamming the drawer shut and giving Travis one more dirty look before lying down on top of him. 

Nolan doesn’t know if making out is, like, less awesome for Travis because he’s spent way time doing it than Nolan has, but for Nolan, kissing Travis is something he doesn’t even know how to describe, or, fuck, how to even  _ process.  _ He straddles Travis' hips and cages him in with his elbows and wriggles against him just to feel their bare skin rubbing together, and feels like him and Travis are, like, melting into each other or something. 

“Still good?” Travis mumbles against Nolan’s mouth after they’ve been kissing and brushing their dicks against each others’ hips for so long that Nolan’s tongue is tired. 

“Yes,” Nolan heaves.

Travis exhales shakily, his eyes glazed, his hands splayed out on Nolan’s chest, and with Travis hard and breathing heavy underneath him, Nolan feels sexy for maybe the third time in his life.

“Here,” Travis says, then pushes at Nolan and slides out from under him when Nolan leans his weight off Travis. “I wanna look at you during, but let’s just start like this,” he says, getting up on his hands and knees and then turning so his ass is right there where Nolan can reach, and then he settles down onto his elbows, his hips arched up and his forehead leaning against the mattress.

“O-kay,” Nolan mumbles, feeling like his tongue is swollen. 

Nolan has checked out Travis’ ass, like, a lot. Has seen it naked in the locker room, covered in nothing but tight boxer briefs in their hotel rooms on the road, walking all showily in front of him when Travis knows Nolan is watching, and so he’s, like, not at all surprised by how fucking good it it: round and perfectly shaped and a little bit paler than the rest of him, and just fucking great. 

Nolan grabs the lube and smears it all over the first two fingers of his right hand, then drops the bottle. He uses his dry hand to cup Travis’ ass and squeeze, then runs it down to grab at the hard muscle at the tops of TK’s thighs. “You like my ass, huh?” Travis asks, sounding out of breath. 

“Yeah,” Nolan says in this voice that’s practically a growl, all thick and rumbly in his throat, and he sees Travis shiver.

He spreads his hand out on one cheek, and pulls Travis open, and it’s so far from anything he’s ever done with Travis or even really been able to picture doing with Travis that his head whooshes for a second, not with pain but just with, like, so much of everything. 

“I’m gonna--” Nolan stares at Travis and tries to think anything other than  _ fuck _ . “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Patty, I’m fucking ready,” Travis says impatiently, and Nolan runs his thumb over Travis’ hole, feeling like he’s in a trance. 

He remembers the first time he watched gay porn. He’d spent like a year watching straight stuff, staring at the guys and not really thinking about it, and then after he  _ had  _ thought about it, he spent almost a year too scared to watch anything, and so he was sixteen by the time he finally pulled up a video, in a hotel room alone because his road rommate was sick, earbuds plugged into his phone, volume still turned down to one and his finger pressed tight over his phone's speaker just in case, took a deep breath, and pushed play. 

First, he’d thought, _oh._ Like, _oh, wow,_ _yep, definitely into this_ and _oh, that’s how it works._ And then, when one guy had buried his face in the other guy’s ass while they both jerked off, he’d thought, _oh_ ** _fuck._**

Jerking off on the couch with Travis earlier was Nolan’s oh moment again. Like, he'd always basically known that being with Travis would be perfect and hot and everything Nolan wanted, but when they got off together, he  _ really _ knew it. 

Running his thumb over the skin of Travis’ hole is the biggest  _ oh fuck  _ moment of Nolan’s life. He feels like his brain shuts off and he’s just panting lungs and a drooling mouth and a leaking dick and throbbing balls, and the palms of his hands hot and sweating against Travis’ skin.

“Come  _ on, _ ” Travis says, and Nolan pushes his pointer fingertip inside him. 

Travis makes a happy, crazy hum, and Nolan says, “Woah,” his voice all shaky, his  _ finger  _ shaky inside the tight rim of Travis’ hole. 

Nolan works his finger further in, pulling at the edges of Travis’ rim when Travis says to; adding another finger when Travis says, “Do two"; curving his fingers and looking for Travis’ prostate when Travis says, “A little further, bend them, back down, ugh, come on, further up, _ ohh. _ ”

He doesn’t do anything, like, fancy, because he can barely think and coordinate his body enough to do the simple thrusting and stretching and rubbing. 

“Travis,” he says, meaningless, mindless. 

“Pat,” Travis sighs, drawing out the “a” and making Nolan feel like a fucking god. “Three, okay?” Travis says, rolling his face back and forth against the bed and arching his back. 

Nolan pulls out, adds more lube, and pushes back in with three fingers, just, like, fucking staring at Travis’ hole stretching out so his fingers can sink inside. 

“Fuck, Travis.” 

“Mhh, lie down,” Travis says into the mattress, and then, when Nolan doesn’t, reaches back and grabs at Nolan’s wrist, pushing. Nolan pulls his fingers out and looks up, watching Travis sit up and turn around, meeting his eyes for the first time in what feels like hours.

They look at each other for a long minute, both just wide-eyed and panting, and then Travis slaps his hands on Nolan’s chest and shoves him down onto his back, following him quickly, swinging his leg over Nolan's hips and putting his open mouth against Nolan’s, kissing him sloppy, all tongue and breath. 

“Hey, do you need a condom?” Travis asks, pulling away an inch. His voice fast like it gets when he’s thinking a ton of things at once he says, “Because I kinda don’t want you to wear one if you don’t want to, because it’s your first time and I want it to, like, really rock for you and I want you to come in me, so, if you’re good I’m good, like--” he stops talking and sucks in a breath.

“I’m good,” Nolan says, just as desperate and uncool as Travis, and Travis nods.

Nolan blinks, making his eyes focus, and looks at Travis’ dick, which is hard and dark and curved up against his stomach and shiny with precum, and damn, Nolan wants it. He reaches out clumsily, his fingers brushing the head, and Travis thrusts into his touch, his cock sliding against Nolan’s palm, hot and hard. 

Nolan tries to sit up so he can get a better grip on Travis and maybe kiss him again, but Travis pushes him back down. He moves further up on Nolan's lap, settles his palms on Nolan’ hips, and then just pauses, hovered above Nolan, both their cocks hard and straining, both their chests heaving, Nolan’s dick shiny wet with lube and Travis’ thighs shaking, his chest flushed dark red, his tongue darting out over and over to lick at his lips, his eyes blinking fast and heavy as he stares down at Nolan. “Don’t know why I’m fucking nervous,” he says with a shaky laugh, and that fucking  _ kills  _ Nolan.

“Trav,” he says, soft, sitting up to wrap his arms around Travis’ waist, yanking him forward so he’s pressed as close to Nolan’s chest as he can get. “You don’t have to be nervous, come on.” 

“No, I know,” Travis says, running his palms up and down Nolan’s ribs. “I just want it to be like, really good for you.”

“Buddy,” Nolan says, heaving out a laugh at how stupid that is. “Come on.” He pushes Travis’ chin up and ducks his head down to kiss at Travis’ neck, his jaw, the tops of his shoulders. 

Travis runs his hands up and down one more time, then slaps them against Nolan’s sides sort of like he would if they were playing hockey, getting pumped to go out on the ice together. He pulls away a little bit, and Nolan drops his arms but stays sitting up, close to Travis, and grabs onto his hips. “Okay, yeah,” he says, his voice steadier and louder. And then he gets up on his knees, grabs Nolan’s dick, looks up to meet Nolan’s eyes, and sits back, pressing his rim to the head of Nolan’s dick.

Nolan’s not super worried about coming too soon, because he’s so fucking tense and focused on making Travis come that he thinks it’s going to take, like, actual concentration for him to actually orgasm, but, fuck, if he was feeling easy and loose right now the way he sometimes is when he gets himself off, he could come  _ now. _

“Okay, this is gonna change your life, are you ready?” Travis asks, half genuinely cocky and half pretending to be, the same way Nolan’s seen him act a hundred times on the ice.

“Yeah bud,” Nolan says honestly, bringing his hands up to rest on the tops of Travis’ thighs, totally--like,  _ totally _ \--fucking content to lie back and let Travis do whatever the fuck he wants to him. 

Which is, like apparently, to just sit down on Nolan’s dick all in one slow, hot, slick move.

Travis moans when he eventually gets Nolan all the way inside him, settling his weight on Nolan’s thighs. “Wow, Pats.” 

“What?” Nolan asks, because his brain is, like, empty. 

“Wow,” Travis repeats, moving back up on Nolan’s dick, his hole so tight where it slides over Nolan it’s practically fucking painful. 

Travis goes slow for a long time, just staring down at Nolan, his eyes all pupil, his hands sweaty and slipping on Nolan's skin, Nolan just staring up at his face and his abs and the way his dick bounces up and down when he drops his hips against Nolan's.

Then Travis shifts, pushes Nolan back down onto his back and braces his hands on Nolan’s abs, and, just, like, goes for it. “Oh, fuck,” Nolan says as Travis starts to move up and down on his cock so fast Nolan distantly thinks that it must not be super good for Travis' thighs. 

“Oh fuck is right, shit, Patty, you’ve got such a big fucking cock. Damn, so fucking good. Shit, Nolan.”

And that pushes Nolan totally out of his head and all the way into his body. He can't think about anything, but he can feel literally every _single_ thing. Travis’ comforter sliding against the soles of his feet, Travis squeezing around him, Travis’ hands pressing down on his chest, his fingers wriggling just a little, stroking. The way his own mouth is dry from panting with it wide open, the corners of his lips sticky with half-dried spit, his eyes tingling and wet like he could cry for no reason. 

He distantly notices Travis grabbing his own dick and stripping his fist up and down it so fast it’s blurry. “Let’s come, come on baby, come,” Travis says, leaning forward to mouth at Nolan’s chest and then bite his nipple, and then Nolan feels Travis’ come hot against the skin of his stomach and the hot wet tightness all around his dick kicks up from insane to _ in-sane,  _ and Nolan’s hips jerk up into Travis and he comes fucking in _ side _ of him, making this stupid low noise from way down in his chest.

Nolan's limbs feel like they're sinking into the bed, his whole body just heavy and tired even though he did none of the fucking work.

He must kind of fall asleep a little, because the next thing he really notices is Travis wiping Nolan's dick with one of the soft white wipes he had in his drawer, bending down to kiss his thigh, and then crawling up the bed and tucking himself under Nolan’s arm. 

“That was perfect,” Travis says, his voice dreamy and fucked out. Which is thanks to  _ Nolan’s  _ dick, shit.

Nolan’s body is dripping sweat and his cock is sore, but his brain is finally starting to work, ish. “Sorry I passed out,” he mumbles, turning his face into Travis’ hair, still damp from his shower and smelling freshly of his shampoo.

“No, no worries, I like taking care of you,” Travis says earnestly. And maybe Nolan’s not supposed to like getting taken care of. Maybe he doesn’t even, most of the time. But he’s not going to complain about Travis cleaning him up after sex while Nolan lies sprawled out on the bed, wrung out from Travis’ fucking  _ ass.  _

“How’s your head?” Travis asks. Nolan has to think for a second, and when he remembers why Travis is asking, it’s the first time he’s thought about his headache or even his migraines in general since Travis crawled in bed with him. 

“Oh,” he says, surprise audible in his voice. “Fine.” He looks over at Travis, blinking, his eyes feeling heavy and kind of teary again, but fuck that, no fucking  _ way  _ is he going to cry, so he just stares at Travis’ brown eyes, his dark hair flopped down over his forehead in sweaty strands.

Travis reaches up and tucks Nolan’s hair behind his ear, studying him. “What’re you thinking?”

Nolan licks his lips, and then, just figures, whatever. “I love you,” he says, quiet but, like, clear and not mumbly.

Travis sits up so fast the mattress creaks under him, leaning down over Nolan and giving him this wide-eyed look and then saying, “Shit Pats, I’m so fucking in love with you, I can’t fucking be _ lieve  _ you said it first, fuck you,” and then shoving his lips up against Nolan’s in this wide, hungry kiss, and Nolan’s whole body pulses with how fucking happy he feels.


	12. Chapter 12

Nolan’s spent six of the last seven nights in Travis’ bed: four with Travis; two with just the smell of Travis on the sheets and the sound of his voice from a hotel in Missouri. He’s tasted the insides of Travis’ cheeks, his morning breath, his come. 

Travis has been annoying, switching between constantly trying to make Nolan laugh, which is the same shit he’s always done, and trying to make Nolan hard when they’re doing everyday shit like rinsing the dishes or watching TV. And he’s, like, really good at both, so Nolan's pretty much horny and, like, happy, all the time. 

They’ve told both of their families and Nico and fucking Beezer and G, who Travis apparently got all invested somehow while Nolan’s been out, that they're together and agreed to not worry about coming out to other people for a little while. 

The day after they got together he and Travis talked about the fact that dumbass fucking Travis thought that he would make Nolan’s migraines worse by being around him and the thing where Nolan came close-ish to kissing someone else just because he was so fucked up over Travis. They both agreed they need to, like, work on being better at communication or whatever, and then Travis said, “Okay, let’s never talk about serious shit again” and made Nolan cry laughing. 

The whole thing is pretty chill until, one week in, Nolan gets one of the worst fucking migraines he’s ever had.

All Nolan does is flinch away from the lights a little, pull the blanket he’s wrapped up with on the couch over his head a bit, and Travis is hopping up from the other end of the couch, bringing Nolan his bottle of pills, turning all the lights in the apartment off, grabbing Nolan’s cold eye mask out of the freezer and strapping it to Nolan’s head from behind, then coming around and crouching by the couch so he can squint at Nolan through the little slitted eye holes in the mask.

Nolan just looks at him, because it’s  _ Travis,  _ so he’s not going to pretend he’s okay or some shit, but he also doesn’t want to say, like. Something weak. 

“Want Ralphy?” Travis asks. ‘Ralphy’ is a weiner-dog shaped rice thing that Travis sent him months ago and that he’d fucking named when he found it in Nolan’s duffle bag last week. 

Nolan keeps his face flat. “Kind of.” 

Travis reaches over and strokes his hand over Nolan’s jaw, then leans in and kisses the cold skin right above his mask. “Okay, babe, one sec.” 

Nolan closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to watch Travis go to the kitchen for him. He listens to him rifle through drawers, start the microwave, then pop it open and walk back toward the couch, and then the heavy, warm weight of--fucking Ralphy, whatever--is settling over Nolan’s shoulders, curling around his neck. 

“Anything else?” Travis asks, soft, and Nolan shakes his head. He’s already got a bottle of Gatorade sitting on the coffee table next to him. Travis pets Nolan’s hair, and then moves and lifts Nolan’s legs up so he can slide himself under them on the other end of the couch. 

He’s quiet for a few minutes, his fingers making shapes on Nolan’s calf, and Nolan feels pathetic, because he is, but, like. He’d one hundred percent rather have Travis here with him seeing him being pathetic than have Travis not here.

Nolan’s migraine ticks up a little, this pain that makes him want to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure, and he curls into himself.

Travis taps Nolan’s knee. “Remember Claude’s wedding?”

“Yeah,” Nolan rasps. 

“Remember when we danced?” 

“Mhm.” They’d been on the dance floor together doing the cha-cha-slide or something stupid (Nolan’d been drunk), and then DJ had put on a slow song, and when Nolan had looked at Travis to ask if he wanted to get another drink, Travis had said, “hey, dance with me,” and Nolan just, like,  _ had.  _ He’d grabbed Travis’ hand and twirled him around, showy like it could still be a joke if Travis wanted it to, but then when he was done Travis had kept his hand in Nolan’s and stepped right up into Nolan’s chest, cupped his free hand around the back of Nolan’s neck and pressed his face into Nolan’s shoulder, so Nolan put his arm around Travis waist and just, like, swayed around with him.

“That was nice, huh? The other guys thought we were joking, but I was, like, pretty sure we both weren’t. And I was so hot about how big you were, like, your fucking shoudlers, jeez.” Travis grabs Nolan’s foot and digs his thumb into the arch, hard, making Nolan grunt, the sharp second of pain at the opposite end of his body distracting him from his head for a minute. “Anyway, that’s how long I’ve been in love with you.” 

Nolan rolls from his side to his back so he can look at Travis, Ralphy’s head lolling on his shoulder, the plastic of his mask blocking his view a little so all he can see is Travis’ face, serious and intent. He feels like he could cry pretty easily.

Nolan kicks the foot that Travis is still holding and curls back up on his side, scrunching himself down closer to Travis. “It was longer than that, for me,” he mumbles, and that starts Travis off on a whole mission to find out the exact moment Nolan fell in love with him, which is so embarrassing Nolan’s literally never going to tell him. 

***

By February, Nolan’s practicing with the team most days, and he’s also still getting migraines most days. 

He’s spent the last few weeks acting like he’s actually getting ready to come back, talking to the media and the guys on the team like it’s just a matter of time, but the season is starting to wind down, and no matter how many times Nolan says he’s sure he’ll play this year, he’s not actually feeling any closer to better than he did six months ago. 

Nolan’s thought about not playing hockey before: he’s spent hours in hospital beds; stitched up; sitting on a suit on the sidelines, and thinking,  _ I’ll die if I can’t play again.  _

He’s spent a lot of time thinking that there’s nothing for him outside of hockey. Even Travis, even Nico, even Nolan's fucking dad have always been all wound up in it. 

Nolan’s sick of his head hurting. He’s dying to get back out on the ice and do the thing he loves.

But for pretty much the first time in his life, he sort of believes that his world’s not going to end if he doesn't get back on the ice. 

One night after he’s just fucked Travis and they’re in bed trying to go to sleep, Travis’ head on Nolan’s shoulder, he asks Travis, “What if I don’t get better?”

Travis rolls over when Nolan talks, his chin digging into Nolan’s pec, and meets Nolan’s eyes, looking intense. He props himself up with a forearm on Nolan’s ribs and says, quick and easy, like he’s already thought about it, “We can buy a bunch of land on a lake, and we can hunt and fish it and live off the land and fuck like cavepeople. Or, like, pioneers."

“Is that supposed to be hot?”

“Or we can stay here for a few years and I’ll win the Stanley Cup and have ‘em put ‘Travis Patrick’ on it.” 

“Ew.” 

“We could get a house in the suburbs with a big yard and buy a bunch of dogs.”

“Shut up, you’d hate the suburbs.”

Travis smiles up at him and leans down to kiss his chest. “Whatever you want, okay? I’ll be your sugar daddy.” He hooks a leg over Nolan’s hips and nuzzles into his neck, licking at it all slobbery and gross, being obnoxious just to get Nolan out of his head in this way that he’s been doing for years without Nolan noticing. 

Nolan knows he's probably supposed to say  _ fuck no,  _ he’s not going to be a fucking WAG or, like HAB or whatever, he's not going to fucking give up; he’s going to play hockey no matter fucking what, even if it hurts him so bad he cries every night, even if he needs a hundred more surgeries, even if he gets so many concussions he can’t taste, can’t sleep, can’t see. 

But all he can think about is that he’s spent this whole season changing every single thing about his life so he can play hockey again, and how fucked is it that he hasn’t played in months but if someone, like, asked him to make a list of things about himself, he would put “hockey player” first and “injury-prone” second, before “gay” and “likes music” and “big brother” and “in love with Travis Konecny," even though those are things he’s going to be for fucking years after he’s done playing hockey, even if he ends up playing til he’s forty. 

“Yeah, okay, daddy,” he says. 

Travis snorts against his neck, mumbles, “ _ Gross,"  _ then looks up at Nolan so they can grin at each other. 

The next day, Nolan takes “Flyers #19” out of his Instagram bio and changes his profile pic from him in his gear, celebrating a goal, to a selfie of him and Travis. 

***

Nolan decides he’s going to bottom for Travis on February fifteenth. 

Travis treated Nolan so good on Valentine’s day, fucking _ flowers  _ and five orgasms spread throughout the day--one in the stall of a public bathroom at the concert Travis gave Nolan tickets to at Christmas--and migraine-diet approved sushi, and this dumb card with a little sushi roll and a bottle of soy sauce over the words “you’re my soy mate,” which made Nolan roll his eyes and also feel, like, loved and appreciated or whatever, and which he’d hung on Travis’ fridge and looked at like fifty times since Travis had given it to him yesterday morning. 

Nolan sucks at actual gifts, but he wants to give Travis something that says, like, I love you and I see how much you do for me and you're my favorite person in the world. And he also is, like, pretty fucking into the idea of getting Travis' dick inside him.

The Flyers have an afternoon game, so Nolan has to wait around all day half-hard and just waiting to get fucked. 

Him and Travis take Travis’ pregame nap together, eat Travis’ pregame meal together, talk about Buffalo’s defense and power play just like they would if they were both about to go play together. 

Nolan thinks about bringing it up then, “ _ Hey, would you want to fuck me tonight?"  _ but it just seems too fucking weird to say it at the kitchen table with dirty plates in front of them and Charlie right by Nolan’s ankles.

They walk Charlie, and then Travis gets in his gameday suit, which makes Nolan have to push Travis against the wall and suck on his neck for like five minutes before Travis says, “Uuuuuugh,” sounding all miserable that he has to go, and pushes Nolan off and slips out the door, shutting it almost all the way like he needs a barrier between them, then glaring through the open slice of it at Nolan. 

“Don’t watch if your head hurts, okay?” 

Nolan scowls at him, and Travis just stares patiently back. “Obviously yeah, but I feel fine, so fucking play good."

Travis smiles, wedges his face into the inches between the door and the wall, and purses his lips. Nolan groans about what an idiot Travis is and leans in and gives him a quick kiss. Travis pulls away, shuts the door even further, and then pushes his eye up against the crack and says, “Bring Charlie to kiss me too." Nolan yanks the door closed, and Travis cackles from the other side. “Bye, love you!” he says. 

“Love you, good luck,” Nolan tells him, and Travis makes one more smacking kiss sound and then nothing else, so Nolan assumes he finally leaves. 

The game that night is the first one Nolan’s been approved to watch in months. He’s supposed to be avoiding screens, and obviously he’s broken the rules a bit, watched movies and shows with Travis and looked up Flyers highlights on his phone. But he hasn’t actually watched a full game other than the one against the Jets since he first started getting treatment. 

When the pregame footage starts, Nolan feels jealous of Travis for two seconds while he watches warmups, Travis zipping around the ice like it’s nothing. Nolan’s been going to practice with the team for almost two months, but he’s still on no-contact and still feels like he’s struggling to catch up with the other guys all the time, and he misses just being able to have fun and do the shit he knows his body should be able to do. 

And then he gets over that and just enjoys watching Travis be happy and play his hockey, weaving out of people and snapping at them and glaring when he’s on the bench, scoring this bar-down goal from the middle of nowhere that makes Nolan fucking hot.

The Flyers win, and Travis gets third star, which means he’ll have to talk to the media and then shower and then get dressed and then he’ll probably go sign some kid’s stick because he’s such a nice guy or whatever, so Nolan’s going to have to wait fucking forever for Travis to come home and fuck him.

Nolan walks Charlie so he won’t have to worry about him once Travis gets home. Takes his second shower of the day and pays special attention to his ass. He pulls on black boxer briefs Travis likes and gets in bed, and then lets Charlie hop in and tuck into him cozily, telling him, “You’re leaving once TK gets here.” He sends Travis a selfie of them smiling and looking soft that says, “Nice game!” then decides that one’s too sweet, so he sends one of himself looking grumpy that says, “Get the fuck home.” 

Then he just lies in bed with his phone facedown on his stomach and tries not to get nervous, because everything he read online said being tense would make it harder, like that’s a calming fucking thought. 

Nolan’s phone vibrates after a while, then vibrates again as Nolan picks it up. “Scored for you, babe 😘,” Travis sent. Then, “meant that for Charlie, fyi.” Nolan’s phone vibrates again while he’s smiling at it, and Travis says, “On my way 🧡.” 

Charlie climbs up onto Nolan’s chest, his paws light and gentle, and nudges Nolan’s phone out of the way, whining for Nolan’s attention. Nolan drops his phone and scratches Charlie’s chin, making his mouth drop open and his tongue loll out so he’s smiling at Nolan. He flops down on Nolan’s chest, and Nolan just pets him and lets himself zone out for a minute.

Nolan would have expected to be like super fucking nervous about his first time bottoming, but he's just really not. He’s already done like forty first-times with Travis, and they’ve all gone fine, and he knows Travis is going to take care of him and be there with him and make it good for him, so whatever. 

And also he knows how good topping feels, and he actually can’t fucking wait to make Travis feel that good. Can’t wait to hear Travis moaning and grunting and looking at Nolan like Nolan’s like a fucking miracle. 

He half sleeps for a while, and wakes up to Charlie standing up on his chest and turning his head sharply towards the hallway. They both stay there, still and listening, and then the door opens and closes. Charlie jumps down and yips, running out of the bedroom.

“Patty?” Travis calls, his voice echoing through the apartment. “Aw, hey Char,” he says more softly. 

“I’m in here,” Nolan yells back, not getting out of the bed because, like, he really hasn’t planned this thing out much further, but he had kind of liked the idea of Travis getting home and walking into the bedroom to find Nolan almost naked and sprawled out on the bed and, like, waiting for him. 

So he just keeps waiting. Listens to the ringing of Travis dumping food into Charlie’s bowl, because he always overfeeds him. Breathes and feels his body sinking into the mattress as Travis’ footsteps come down the hall. 

“Dude, I couldn't stop thinking about you watching," Travis is saying before he even opens the door. “Fucking thinking about--" he pauses for half a second when he gets in the room and sees Nolan spread on the bed, one arm above his head, thighs tilted outwards so Travis can really, like, get a good look at his leg muscles and the underwear he wore for Travis and the bulge of his dick in them. "Oh, good, you read my mind," Travis says easily. 

Travis is wearing his game suit with bare feet and no tie, his hair messy from a hat he must have just taken off. 

“You were really good," Nolan says flatly. "Come here."

Travis, who is, like, the king of undressing fast, Nolan’s learned in the past few weeks, manages to get all the way down to his boxers and a half unbuttoned shirt on his way across the bedroom, and then he’s climbing onto the bed and rolling onto Nolan, diving into his mouth and getting his hands all over Nolan’s chest and in his hair and around his biceps. 

They make out hungrily, Travis straddling Nolan’s hips, Nolan’s hands wrapping around Travis’ waist and then running flat up and down his chest and abs, Travis' skin so warm and soft. Travis licks into his mouth, fucks his tongue in. 

Nolan’s hard and gasping when Travis pulls off and sits back, his ass coming down to rest on Nolan’s dick. Travis unbuttons his shirt quickly, yanks it off, drops it over the side of the bed. 

He looks Nolan up and down, so Nolan looks Travis up and down: his pretty eyes, his nice fucking forearms, his hair, damp from his shower at the rink, hanging over his forehead. The tan of his skin all the way down his abs, the hint of a tan line low on his hips. 

Travis puts a hand on Nolan’s stomach and digs his fingers in, drawing Nolan’s focus back up to his eyes. Grins down at Nolan and says, in his stupid grimy dirty voice that shouldn’t be so hot, “I wanna watch you.”

And that’s fucking fine with Nolan. Like, Nolan loves being watched by Travis basically as much as anything else they’ve done in bed. 

He pushes Travis off him and slips out of his underwear, grabs at his already hard dick and strokes it, squeezing and teasing himself the way Travis does, watching Travis’ eyes on him. 

And he’s better at communicating when he doesn’t have to actually talk anyway, so when Travis is looking unfocused and blissed out, Nolan reaches his hand down to grab at his balls, which makes Travis sigh, and then dips it lower, bending one knee up so he can brush his fingertips over his hole, which makes Travis’ eyes sharpen and jerk up to meet Nolan’s, his irises ringed in a dark circle of green, looking surprised. He looks down to watch Travis' cock twitch against his underwear. 

Nolan’s never touched himself like this before, so it feels weird and kind of messed up at first, like this is a part of his body he’s not supposed to be touching, even though he’s touched Travis here a hundred times now. Travis hasn’t come anywhere near Nolan’s ass either, though, staying consciously away from it like he thought Nolan would freak out if Travis’ fingers went past his taint or something. 

Nolan runs his finger around his rim, and once he stops thinking too much about it, it’s good-ish; sensitive and private feeling in this way that kind of gets his blood pumping. But Nolan doesn’t actually focus on it too much, because he’s looking up at Travis, holding his eyes and taking in the way Travis’ whole face just looks so crazy, his eyes wide and his lips just gaping open. 

“Patty, dude.”

Maybe in an alternate universe Nolan’s the kind of guy who can be seductive and, like, coy or whatever, or even just blunt and honest about every single thing he wants like Travis is, but it’s this universe, so his neck is already so hot he’s sweating and his voice is grumpy and muffled when he says, “Will you fuck me.” 

Travis blinks, like that's a huge fucking surprise. “You want me to fuck you?”

“Yeah,” Nolan says, blushing harder. “Or whatever, if you don’t want to.” 

“Fuck babe, yeah I want to, holy shit.” He climbs up over Nolan, clumsily straddling Nolan’s waist and his arms, which are still down between Nolan’s legs. He cups Nolan’s face and kisses him hard. “Seriously? You really want it?"

“Yes,” Nolan bites out, annoyed but also, like, so in love with Travis, who, like, hasn’t stopped making Nolan feel special and safe since the day they got together, that it makes his chest hurt. 

“Okay,” Travis says, studying Nolan and then kissing him once more, his mouth wide open, before he pulls back and slips his underwear off and then settles onto his knees between Nolan’s thighs, his erection red and standing straight up against his abs, his dick so good looking it makes Nolan's ass feel empty. 

“Wanna, uh?” Nolan mumbles out, his dick throbbing just from the way Travis is looking at him. 

“Yeah,” Travis says quickly, his voice husky, and Nolan pulls his hand out from between his legs and spreads his thighs, tipping his hips up a little to give Travis space to just. Do whatever. 

Travis takes in a shaky breath, then heaves it out all at once and lunges forward and down, his hands cupping and squeezing and pushing at the backs of Nolan’s thighs, shifting Nolan’s hips up even more and then tracing his tongue, light and pointed and wet, in a circle around the rim of Nolan’s asshole.

“Fuuuuck,” Nolan says, his voice getting high in this way that is not sexy at all.

“Yeah fuck,” Travis agrees, sounding distracted. He pulls back for a half a second and flicks a glance up at Nolan, his face framed between Nolan’s flushed thighs, and then dives back in deeper, his tongue wet and sloppy and prodding at Nolan’s hole; slipping in and wriggling, the feeling so weird and surprising that Nolan jerks his hips up against Travis’ mouth. “Mph,” Travis says against--like,  _ into--  _ Nolan, sounding happy. His hands knead at the backs of Nolan’s thighs and then slide down to the flesh of his ass and squeeze at that. 

Nolan’s, like, writhing. His legs are twitching and shifting restlessly, his hips flexing up toward Travis’ tongue. Travis wraps his arm around Nolan’s right leg and pulls it over his shoulder, and Nolan thrusts hard up into him, pressing his heel into the muscle of Travis’ lower back, groaning as his dick leaks against his stomach and Travis just fucking eats him out.

Nolan feels like such a fucking a dick for never doing this to Travis. Like, obviously he knew rimming was a thing, but he had literally no idea how to actually go about it, and he’d thought Travis would probably prefer getting his dick sucked anyway, if Nolan was going to be doing something with his mouth. 

But fuck, Travis’ tongue in his ass is like nothing he’s ever even thought about feeling before. So much better than he’d thought someone’s tongue in another person’s ass could possibly be, and he feels like he’s been shitty to Travis the last few months, sucking his dick and fingering him and never thinking to actually do this. 

“Travis,” Nolan whimpers, leg over Travis’ shoulder, Travis’ spit trailing down over his taint and balls, Travis’ tongue pushing in and out of his ass, lapping at his rim. Every part of him feels fucking, just, like, open. Whatever. Something. “Can you please,” he whines. 

He needs Travis to do fucking anything, because Nolan feels he’s full of so many nerve endings that he’s gonna die. 

And Travis is always fucking perfect, so he pulls his tongue out, tips his chin sideways to kiss the inside of Nolan’s thigh, and then slides a finger into Nolan all at once. 

“Ho-ly,” Travis says, drawing out the O into two syllables, his voice tilting up at the end, such a Travis thing, something Nolan’s heard a hundred times on the ice. 

Nolan honestly can’t even think for a second about whether it hurts or feels good, because all he’s thinking about is that he’s got Travis inside of him. 

“Patty,” Travis breathes. “Okay?” 

Nolan moans, and yeah: Travis’ finger is a stretch and his spit is drying up so it burns a little as he starts to pull out and Nolan’s body is saying, what the fuck is this and holy fuck, what is  _ this.  _ “Lube?” Nolan croaks, his voice getting weak in this way that it always does halfway into sex, when he’s about to seriously fucking lose his chill. 

“Yeah, duh,” Travis says, rolling his eyes so dramatically he has to move his whole head around to do it, tossing his hair back off his head. He slips his finger out of Nolan and crawls away for one second to grab the bottle out of the nightstand, then flops himself back down between Nolan’s legs, squirts lube noisily onto his fingers, and gets back to work. 

Travis gets him opened up quickly. Nolan’s out of his head the way Travis always gets him during sex; Travis’ tongue apparently got him pretty, like, loose without Nolan even feeling like he was being stretched, and so it takes no time for Travis to work him up so he's feeling ready for Travis' cock, impatient, but Travis just slows way the fuck down. Gets three fingers in Nolan and then just keeps them there, going so slow he’s barely fucking moving, his fingers rubbing against the inside of Nolan’s rim until it burns, his eyes fixed on Nolan’s face, watching so close that Nolan can’t look at him without blushing or, like, fucking whimpering. “Come on,” Nolan says, pushing his heel hard into Travis’ thigh. “Hurry the fuck  _ up, _ ” he tells Travis, thrusting up against his hand. 

Travis just watches him and moves slow in and out of him and stays quieter than he’s ever fucking been in bed. 

“What are you  _ doing _ ?” Nolan says, trying to be bitchy but ending up sounding like he’s fucking begging. His hips are doing their own fucking thing, trying to slide down the bed to get an inch closer to Travis’ dick.

“Just--fucking--looking at you,” Travis says, his voice low and gravelly. 

“Teeks,” Nolan complains. 

“Yeah, okay,” Travis says after a minute, and then finally pulls his fingers out, leaving Nolan feeling empty, like his ass is trying to grab onto something. 

Travis leans over to grab a condom, and Nolan reaches up, fumbles it out of Travis’ hand, and throws it on the floor, glaring at Travis. He’s fucked Travis bareback since the first time, fuck Travis if he thinks Nolan can’t fucking handle it, too. 

Travis just nods, looking like he's fucking concussee, and kneels between Nolans thighs.

Then he starts asking Nolan shit, like Nolan wants to fucking  _ talk,  _ like he can even think about anything other than the idea of Travis’ dick in him. “You want it like this?” he asks, gesturing to Nolan on his back. Nolan nods; gasps in air. “You feel ready?” he asks, running his palms over Nolan’s hipbones. Nolan arches off the bed. “Are you still sure?” he breathes, the head of his dick tracing down Nolan’s crack. 

“Stop asking me shit,” Nolan finally spits out, spreading his thighs as wide open as he can get them, splaying himself out for Travis. “Yes.” 

Travis smiles at him, his cheeks dimpling and his eyes all happy and sweet. He bends down to kiss Nolan and tells him, “I love you,” against his lips. 

“I know, stop it,” Nolan says, jerking his hips down, making the head of Travis’ dick slide against his hole. 

“Okay needy," Travis says, rolling his eyes and acting like he’s fucking put out by having to fuck Nolan.

He pushes Nolan’s thigh a little further out to the side, gets his knee under Nolan’s knee, and then starts to push into Nolan’s ass. 

Travis always talks like fucking nonstop about how big Nolan’s dick is, but Travis’ dick is, like, barely even that much smaller. 

So, like, it’s a stretch. Painful-ish, but, like, really nothing on the spectrum of all the pain Nolan’s felt in his life. Mostly just fucking weird for a while, and then, when Travis gets all the way inside, just so close and intimate that it’s kind of good even if it doesn’t really feel like sex.

The weirdness of it gets Nolan out of his head a little. W.hen he looks up, Travis' eyes are huge and unfocused, his teeth nibbling at his lip.

Travis leans down, settling one hand on the bed beside Nolan's shoulder, and says, in this low, amazed voice, "Oh,  _ buddy. _ " 

Nolan snorts, surprised, and then cracks up so hard his ass is clenching around Travis' dick.

Travis just looks down at Nolan like he can’t think, which is nice since usually Nolan’s the one who’s so out of it during sex. 

“Nols, fuck,” Travis tells him, and then slowly slides back out, another weird feeling. He lets his dick pop all the way out of Nolan’s hole, and Nolan feels himself clench down on nothing. Travis sits up and readjusts Nolan’s hips a little, and then thrusts back in at a different angle, a little harder, and the head of his cock bangs into Nolan’s prostate, and then that quick Nolan fucking gets it, fucking stops laughing. 

Travis keeps going slow, his cock brushing over all these sensitive spots inside Nolan, slick and sliding, making Nolan moan, making these weird little lines of shivers go up his spine to tickle the back of his neck; this feeling of almost coming pulsing from his ass to his dick even though he knows, like, he’s pretty sure, that he’s not actually about to orgasm. 

Travis picks up one of Nolan’s hands, sets it on Nolan’s chest and says, “Play with your--” all breathy and low, and Nolan pinches his own nipple, pulls and rubs it until it’s sore, more sensitive than he usually is there just because Travis is watching. 

Nolan wants to keep being cocky about staying focused while Travis loses it. Maybe the alternate universe Nolan who has game and is, like, really good at sex could fuck down against Travis’ dick, reach up and roll Travis’ nipples like he likes, lean up and kiss Travis. When Nolan fucks Travis, Travis is always moving, talking, feeling Nolan up.

Nolan just fucking  _ can’t,  _ though. Can’t do anything but fucking lie there, all sprawled out on Travis’ dick, and feel it, heavy, stretch, just this crazy fullness. He can’t do anything but just take it, and then, when Travis pants, “Touch your cock,” reach weakly down and cup his dick in his fingers like he’s protecting it, because his balls are so sore and his dick is so sensitive that he feels like when he comes, it’s gonna hurt. 

Travis knocks Nolan’s hand out of the way when he doesn’t do anything but hold himself. Wraps a few fingers around Nolan’s dick but then instead of stroking, brings his thumb up to Nolan’s slit and rubs there, little lines and circles, loops down to the sensitive spot under the head and up to where Nolan’s leaking precum. 

“Trav,” Nolan wobbles, his whole body feeling shaky and tense and hot and sweaty, his ass full, his prostate burning every time Travis’s dick traces over it. 

“Come on, buddy,” Travis says, thrusting in hard and pressing his thumb into the slit of Nolan’s cock, and Nolan’s eyes fall shut, and his whole body shakes. 

He comes, and it’s, like, the most weirdly intense orgasm he’s ever had. Feels pushed out of him, makes Nolan feel speechless and burnt up and just wasted. Travis fucks into him a few more times, his dick, like stretches Nolan even more, and he grunts, drops down onto one hand over Nolan, his bicep quivering, and yells “ _ Fuck, _ ” so loud there’s actually no way that fucking  _ Nolan’s  _ neighbors didn’t hear it, two floors down from them. 

Travis makes Nolan grilled cheese after. 

Cleans him up with the wipes from the drawer by his bed, which makes Nolan blush harder than anything else they did. Wipes down Nolan’s ass and his stomach where he came all over himself and his dick, which is sensitive and soft like it can’t imagine ever fucking coming again. 

He stares at Nolan with these wide eyes that Nolan can’t figure out, then crawls out of bed and says, “Come on,” and yanks Nolan up out of bed and then all the way into the kitchen. 

He uses all this organic shit, but grilled cheese is still on the very edge of Nolan’s diet plan, but whatever, he can be a rebel for one fucking night, especially since Travis flips the thing over a hundred fucking times in the pan, leaning in close to it and staring at it like he has to make sure it’s the perfect shade of brown. Especially when Travis cuts in in fucking  _ fourths  _ and gives it to Nolan on an actual plate, not paper, and then sits across from Nolan ignoring the grilled cheese he made for himself and just watching Nolan eat, his eyes all over Nolan like he’s fucking Wayne Gretzky or something. 

“Stop,” Nolan finally has to say.

“Nolan,” Travis says, using Nolan’s first name like he never did before they started dating and still basically only does when he’s about to say something that makes Nolan, like, really feel his heart in his chest. 

“What,” Nolan says around a bite of grilled cheese.

Nolan gets himself ready to be, like, emotional and touched, and then Travis says, dead serious, “Your ass is so fucking good.” 

***

There’s a slow, sad slump to the end of the season, a few days of Travis moping in Philly, a miserable flight up to Ontario where Travis has to help Nolan to the tiny airplane bathroom and hold his shoulders and his hat while he throws up, and then Nolan gets four whole fucking months to just get sunburned over and over and laugh with Travis every day and fuck him every night and just feel easy.

He’s gotten good at dealing with his migraines; living through them, and so even though he’s still getting a lot, he’s having the happiest summer of his life. 

Him and Travis spend most days out on the water--Nolan slathered in sunscreen and wearing a hat and the darkest sunglasses he could find to block out most of the sun--fishing and talking. Nolan thought he knew basically every story Travis had to tell, every one of Travis’ moods and expressions, but out on the boat together with nothing else to do, he gets even more of Travis. 

Hears about his first year in the OHL, being the number one draft pick and stressing out before every game. Sees how Travis gets annoyed and shy about it when he goes a whole day without getting a fish, just constantly breaking his lines or missing with the net, how he gets smirky and hot when Nolan catches a really big one. 

“Fishing is your love language, eh bud?” Nolan chirps him one night after Travis brings Nolan and a huge fucking walleye that Nolan caught home and then rides Nolan like Nolan just scored a game winning goal or something. 

They spend time with Travis’ friends and family, too. Nolan’s already met his parents and a few of his best buds from back home. It’s different, obviously, seeing them when they know he and Travis are, like, together, but Chase and Travis’ mom and dad and grandpa are all pretty chill about it; more interested in talking about fishing and hunting and farming than anything to do with Travis and Nolan’s relationship. 

Travis’ friends are all louder versions of him, all even bigger rednecks. Nolan knows Travis wouldn’t introduce Nolan to anyone who wasn’t totally on board with gay people, but he still has a few mornings where he gets nervous about putting on the clothes he would normally wear in the summer in Winnipeg. But he’s trying to be himself all the time or whatever, not just when he's back home or alone with Travis, so he makes himself keep wearing short shorts and sometimes crop tops, gets used to spending whole days blushing either because he’s thinking about what the random small town people around them are thinking or because Travis is staring at his thighs and leaning in to him and whispering shit like “I can see your fucking dick in those shorts, jeez,” way too loud. 

Nolan lets his hair grow down to his shoulders. Lets himself not think about hockey. He does workouts with Travis, but just to keep himself in shape; ready; just in case. 

And in the middle of June, halfway into his whole luxurious summer with Travis, Nolan’s migraines ease up without him even noticing. 

He’s still thinking about his migraines sometimes, still aware of them when they’re splitting his head open, but mostly he’s just trying to accept that even if this is his whole life--sitting on a deck with Travis, working out just because it feels good, fishing, hanging out with Travis’ Ontario buds, having Nolan’s Winnipeg friends and his sisters visit and stay in their spare room--then that’s, like, good. Like, if he had to choose between Travis and hockey, he would choose Travis every single time, so-- So what if he never gets to play hockey again? 

So Travis ends up noticing it first, which honestly isn’t that surprising, because, like, apparently in the months after Nolan’s diagnosis when Travis wasn’t talking to Nolan and Nolan was thinking Travis was just out there living his own life like Nolan didn’t exist, Travis was reading every fucking thing in the world about migraines. Which is actually insane, because Travis is not a reading or, like, learning type of guy. 

Nolan wakes up one morning to find Travis already awake, frowning at his phone, looking focused. He looks over when Nolan yawns, studies him for a second, and then asks, “No migraine?” Nolan closes his eyes and just double checks, runs through his body and makes sure there’s not one crawling up his neck or slowly radiating out from the center of his brain. 

“Nope,” he says, voice scratchy with sleep. “Feelin’ good.” He smiles at Travis and Travis squints at him, then back down at his phone. 

“I think you’ve only had one this week,” he says, his voice slow and blank in a way that it usually isn’t. “And only two last week.” 

That--can’t be right, Nolan thinks at first. But then he tracks back through the days, and. holy shit. “What does that mean?” 

“We should call your doctors.”

Nolan leaves Travis in the waiting room for his exam, but asks if he can come in when the doctors sit him down to tell him their diagnosis or whatever. One of the nurses goes to grab Travis, and Nolan watches the doctor type a few things into his computer while they wait for him. 

Travis slips into the office, out of place in his camo shorts and camo hat and slides, and drops down in the chair next to Nolan, scraping it across the tile floor so they’re right next to each other, reaching over to take his hand. 

“Hey,” he says intently, calling Nolan’s attention to him, ignoring the doctor. Nolan turns his head robotically and meets Travis’ eyes. “It’s fine either way, okay?” 

Nolan blinks, feeling teary. “Yeah, okay.” 

Travis squeezes his hand and turns toward the doctor, and Nolan does the same. 

The doctor smiles kindly, and tells Nolan he’s officially in remission. “It’s not a miracle or anything. Most patients still continue to experience symptoms, but less frequently, and sometimes with less severity. You might miss games or practices occasionally, on days you have symptoms, but I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t be able to play hockey this season.” 

Nolan doesn’t even realize he’s turned toward Travis until he sees Travis face scrunch into the biggest, giddiest smile Nolan’s ever seen on it, and then they’re both scrambling to hug each other, arms around each other’s backs, the arms of their two plastic chairs between them, digging into Nolan’s stomach, Travis’ ribs sturdy under Nolan’s shaky hands. 

As soon as they shut themselves in Travis’ car in the parking garage outside the hospital, Travis pulls an envelope out from under his sun visor and hands it to Nolan.

Nolan rolls his eyes, feeling like he could cry, and rips it open. The card has a picture of Gritty, googly eyed and orange, with a speech bubble that says “Con-gritts-ulations.”

“This is so dumb,” Nolan tells Travis, his throat heavy and rough. 

Travis starts the car. “You’re dumb,” he says, sounding as, like, delicate as Nolan feels. 

Nolan clears his throat, licks his lips. Tries to feel casual and not like he's so in shock that he doesn't know where to start with all the things he needs to do--call his coach, his agent, his family; start working out for real to make sure he's ready to earn his place on the team again; say something in the Flyers group chat; make sure Travis knows how thankful Nolan is for him, how glad he is that they're here, together, how insanely much he fucking loves him. "What do you wanna do now?” 

Travis opens the sunroof and cranks his neck over his shoulder as he backs out of the parking space. He grins over at Nolan. “Let’s go fishing.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading, leaving kudos, and commenting! I was a little nervous about writing about such a popular pairing, but you guys were so kind and supportive, and reading your comments over the past few weeks has made me so so happy. :) :)
> 
> Research for this story included having a ton of migraines, adding $1839 worth of stuff I thought Travis would buy to my cart on Etsy, checking out the truly shocking range of types of dildos for sale on Etsy, shopping for short shorts for Nolan Patrick, and making a file for all the Nolan pictures on my phone.
> 
> I'm, like, blown away by how much love and attention this fic got while I was writing and continues to get still. Thank you all so much for liking this story. :') 😊 I love y'all.
> 
> If you want you can follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/LoveLeah47)!
> 
> Finally: I love comments!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Rattling Cages](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27527005) by [Matriaya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Matriaya/pseuds/Matriaya)




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